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BOOK 



OF A 



HUNDRED BEARS 



By F. DUMONT SMITH, 

Author of ''Blue Waters and Green." 



First Edition 



RAND McNALLY & COMPANY 

Chicago, Illinois 
1909. 



^':l^ 



LiBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two GoDies Received 

MAfi 22 ia09 

Copyrignt £ntry 

cuss Ol ^^0, No. 

COPY B. 



Copyright, iqoq, 
By Rand McNally & Co. 



^-^'7S^5 



TO MY DEAR FRIEND 

BILLY BEAR 

AND THE NINETY-NINE OTHERS, WHOSE FIRST NAMES ARE 

TO THE WRITER UNKNOWN, THIS BOOK 

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 



CONTENTS. 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



Chapter I. 


Denver and Beyond. 


Chapter II. 


Mainly About Bears. 


Chapter III. 


Salt Labe and the Mormons, 


Chapter IV. 


Historical and Otherwise. 


Chapter V. 


. In the Park. 


Chapter VI. 


Old Faithful. 


Chapter VII. 


Yellowstone Lake. 


Chapter VIII. 


The Canon and Its Grizzlies. 


Chapter IX. 


And Dudgeon Smiled. 


Chapter X. 


Untrodden Ways. 


Chapter XI. 


Mammoth Springs. 


Chapter XII. 


The Trail. 


Chapter XIII. 


Norris Basin. 


Chapter XIV. 


Some Suggestions. 



DENVER AND BEYOND 



^Ijapiev X* 





ENVER a^?r BEYOND 



arrive at the Yellowstone and 
all its felicities you go to Ogden 
and turn to the right. You can 
not lose your way, because it is 
the first turn to the right, and 
then you go till they tell you to 
get off. This will be at the western entrance of 
the Park, where the railroad stops. The Conser- 
vators of the Park are truly conservative. Noth- 
ing less archaic than General Young, the Acting 
Superintendent, is permitted within its sacred 
confines. Everything there dates before B. Y. So 
there are no railroads, steam or electric, within the 
Park. When you enter there you leave iron rails, 
and most of your baggage, behind. 

To arrive at Ogden you should go to Denver. 
Providence, the early settlers, who were Wise Guys 



6 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

and the railroads, have so beneficently arranged 
matters that, to break through into the Far West, 
it is most convenient to stop and drop a few dol- 
lars in the Denver slot machine. Few escape, nor 
should you care to do so. You may think you can 
escape Denver. You may select some railroad 
leading westward that apparently leaves Denver 
far to the north or to the south. You embark and, 
by and by, the porter says, ^'Denvah, all out," 
and there you are. You can hardly get away 
from Denver, and Denver knows it. But why 
attempt it? To him who has never seen Denver, 
it is a pure joy. You have come, we will say, 
from some eastern city, with its packing-houses 
and factories, smells and smoke, torrid heat and 
stifling atmosphere, and you step into an air that 
could not be retailed in any prohibitionist com- 
munity because of its intoxicating effect. You 
stand on the streets of a great city, where com- 
merce roars and crashes by you, and raise your 
eyes to the near peace and solemnity of great 
snow-clad mountains that seem only a mile away. 
You breathe western air and behold the familiar 



DENVER AND BEYOND 7 

habitudes and habiliments of the East. The cow- 
boy and the tailor maid elbow each other. Auto- 
mobiles and pack-mules, motor-cycles and moun- 
tain freight- wagons, jostle and crowd each other. 
It is here that the East and West do meet, 
although Mr. Kipling says they never can. 

And they meet in such a friendly, natural way, 
they so hobnob and commingle, so change and 
interchange, putting on and taking off the dress 
and manner, each of each, that you cannot say 
whether this is the westernmost part of the East, 
or the easternmost part of the West, or both. 

Denver, when I saw it again, was just recover- 
ing from the national democratic convention. 
Banners and portraits of the Peerless Leader still 
flaunted the air and insulted republicans. Strange 
stories were told me of that convention and its 
doings. But, tut! why should I monger scandal 
about the democracy? It never injured me, 
even when I was running for office. Let be! 

One great mystery that has long oppressed me 
was here solved. For long we have vainly asked, 
''Why a democratic party?" True, once in four 



8 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

years it gives the Republicans a little healthful 
exercise and compels the distribution of surplus 
funds from Wall Street, and other purlieus of the 
predatory rich, among the honest toilers who con- 
trol the '^labor vote," "the colored vote," and 
other controllable votes. But, to the practical 
man who likes to get results, its quadri-ennial 
gatherings, its nominations, and its 'Viewing with 
alarm," and other resoluting, seem so futile, like 
the empty motions of a child that only pokes its 
finger in its own eye. But Providence has other 
ends than appear to finite vision. All things have 
their use, say the wise men, and here you are. 

As we all know, the past few years have wrought 
a great change in many communities, chiefly those 
democratic. "The South is going dry." Mint 
beds are drying up. Stills no longer still. But 
such profound changes are not made hastily. 
Between each of the great revolutions of nature 
are immediate types partaking of the last and the 
next. Such is the South. It is in the ptero- 
dactyl stage. It is partly dry and partly wet. 
Exit the bar, enter the bottle. This is largely 



DENVER AND BEYOND 9 

true .of all prohibition states, North and South. 
It matters little whether, as in Kansas, you go into 
the third stall of the livery stable and get it out 
of a black bottle, or whether, as in Georgia, you go 
behind a bale in the cotton warehouse and get it 
out of a jug. The effect is the same. The habit 
has become fixed, so fixed that the sturdy rank 
and file of the democracy, with eyes bent on Den- 
ver, provided themselves aforetime with ample 
supplies of bottled goods. The bar habit was not 
for them. 

I am told by Denver men of the utmost recti- 
tude, but whose names I decline to name, that 
bottled supplies were shipped in by the carload — 
by the train load. Tammany alone — but, pshaw! 
anyone knows what Tammany would do. 

And so it resulted that the bars were largely 
deserted. Bartenders of the best, immaculate in 
white jackets, each with twenty-five cents worth of 
ice shining on his shirt front, '^curled and scented 
like an Assyrian bull," waited idly before their 
empty shrines. Their altars were deserted, their 
worship abandoned, their rites forgotten. No one 



10 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

said '^I take mine with sugar.'' No one mur- 
mured '^a little of the same." Gin rickies, dry 
and wet cocktails, remained in their respective 
dens. The high-ball tinkled not, the compound 
of gin fizzed not. The dust gathered on the bar, 
and about the costly cut glass the spider wove his 
snare. 

Meanwhile, the sturdy prohibitionists of Maine 
and Georgia, of Kansas, Iowa and Texas, fore- 
gathered in the alleys and the livery stables and 
in the fastnesses of their rooms. They took it as 
they had been accustomed to. Took it from the 
bottle, straight, or, at most, with plain water, then 
or afterward. From the effeminate half pints of 
Maine and Iowa, to the sturdy quarts of Kansas 
and Georgia, the product of Kentucky and Illinois 
and Ohio and Pennsylvania was there — all pur- 
veyed in bottles bearing the certificate of the 
Pure Food Law. Reassured by that sacred 
emblem of its worth, the Democracy drained the 
last drop from hundreds and thousands of bottles; 
and then there were ' 'empties," which, as every 
boy knows, are worth money. For days the 



DENVER AND BEYOND 1 1 

gamins of Denver reaped a rich harvest — a har- 
vest that renewed itself with each morning light, 
with each outpouring from the convention hall. 
To-day, many an erstwhile barefoot boy rides in 
his own automobile, the beneficiary of that con- 
vention. So say no more that in the scheme of 
things the democracy has no use. 

Lest you may think these things strange, 
improbable, and mere tales of a traveler, I must 
relate an instance of the mysterious ways of pro- 
hibition, the tortuous, blind, complicated manner 
of its workings. A friend of mine, who used to live 
in Atchison, Kansas, one Saturday night desired 
some beer for Sunday. He went to a druggist 
who had a '^permit" to sell for '^medical, mechan- 
ical and scientific purposes." The druggist said, 
''You will have to sign up for it." ''All right!" 
said Bill. The druggist got out his affidavit. 
"What disease shall I say?" Bill studied. He 
never had anything but the measles and he was 
not sure that beer was an antidote for measles. 
Besides that was twenty years ago. He had an 
inspiration. "Look here, you are allowed to sell 



12 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

for mechanical purposes, are you not?" ^^Yes," 
said the druggist. ^^Well, I want this for mechan- 
ical purposes." The druggist wrote ^^mechanical 
purposes." Bill signed, and the druggist delivered 
six bottles of beer. ^^By the way," said the 
druggist, "what mechanical purpose do you want 
that beer for?" Bill fixed the beer under his arm 
and looked the druggist firmly in the eye. "I 
want it to grease a buggy." 

I suppose, like myself, you have wondered why 
republican conventions never sit in Denver. I 
will reveal the secret. It is because telephone 
communication between Denver and Washington 
is too remote and unsatisfactory. Fancy a per- 
sonally conducted republican national convention 
without a direct wire to the White House. To 
illustrate: I was once chosen a delegate to a 
national republican convention. Three astute 
gentlemen, sitting in an upper room of an hotel — 
gentlemen who had cheerfully taken charge of 
the state convention and relieved the delegates of 
their labors — chose me. A kindly railroad, fearful 
of the strain on my finances, sent me a pass. 



DENVER AND BEYOND 13 

There I was. The President had selected the 
permanent and temporary chairman, written the 
platform, and the only thing the convention had 
to do was to fill that innocuous office, the vice- 
presidency. For some unknown reason the Pres- 
ident had failed to indicate his choice of a running 
mate. Selecting a vice-president is a difficult and 
solemn task and requires inspiration. A new 
compound of gin had just been discovered, blonde 
in color but very brunette in its effect. By a 
curious irony of fate a candidate was selected, 
with the aid of this compound, who, later, met his 
first serious setback as the result of a cocktail 
surreptitiously set in front of him by an ill-wisher. 
As for me, I was made a member of the Com- 
mittee on Resolutions. I was informed that it 
was a distinguished honor. The committee met. 
The chairman, selected by the President, blandly 
informed us that he had appointed a sub-com- 
mittee of five to ''prepare a platform." Inas- 
much as it was well known that the chairman, a 
distinguished senator from a New England state, 
had the platform in his pocket, edited thor- 



14 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

oughly by a White House stenographer, the irony 
of his statement struck me as subtle, at least. At 
ten the next morning we met again to hear read the 
platform "prepared" by the sub-committee. The 
chairman read it, with his broad New England 
a's, rolling his r's, and savoring its platitudes as 
though he were the author. Suddenly the senator 
from Kohosh arose. It was the railroad plank. 
"I object to that word. It closes the door. It 
promises nothing." The senator had been drunk 
the night before. That particular compound of 
gin had left its brunette effect. Besides, he sus- 
pected the administration of an intention of 
unseating his delegation. 'The senator from 
Kohosh objects," twittered the chairman. "Yes." 
"What does the senator suggest?" "I have no 
suggestion to make. I merely object," and the 
senator relapsed into dipsetic gloom. The 
chairman looked helplessly about. There was 
no telephone. The White House was inaccessible. 
His whiskers quivered. A visible crepitation ran 
through the forty odd members of the committee. 
Would they dare to change this inspired platform, 



DENVER AND BEYOND 15 

this heaven-born instrument, without orders? 
Assuredly not. I cannot tell how it happened. A 
voice, it seemed to be my own, but it came from 
very far away, as my knees agitated, suggested 
another word. The chairman twittered again. 
A sigh of relief went through the room. The 
senator from Illinois patted me on the back. 
''Does the senator accept the substitute?" ''I 
do." With a trembling hand the chairman 
changed the word. The committee arose. T had 
placed one word in a republican platform. 

''Tell me, ye winged winds that round my 
pathway roar," did ever delegate to a republican 
national convention before or since accomplish so 
much? And all because there was no long-dis- 
tance 'phone in that committee room. 

That mistake will never occur again. Now 
every committee room is properly equipped, and 
no such crisis will ever more confront a com- 
mittee. And so Denver is ineligible for a national 
republican convention. 

I left Kansas City with the thermometer dodging 
the century mark and the asphalt pavement 



DENVER AND BEYOND 17 

trickling in tropical fluidity down the sewers, and 
awoke in that heaven-born air that bathes those 
western highlands, edging their long slopes up to 
the Rockies. I did not linger in Denver, for I had 
been there many times, but, so soon as time and 
tide served, besought my way for Ogden, for Ogden 
is the gateway. There you must go, or else a 
thousand miles southward. Not elsewhere, nor 
between, can steam break through the mighty 
ramparts of the Rockies, and, because it holds the 
key, it sits there at the receipt of custom, and 
takes toll of all who, being East, would like to be 
West, or, being West, would like to be East. Out 
of this remunerative toll that it takes, and out of 
the thrift of its farmers and irrigators, it has 
built up a fair city, a city much automobiled be- 
cause -of its beautiful streets and roads; much 
resorted because of its thermal springs that cure 
everything from rheumatism to dipsomania; with 
one gorgeous cafion whose varied beauties of 
stream and rocks and foliage would make the 
fortune of an eastern resort. 



DENVER AND BEYOND 19 

From there the Oregon Short Line takes you 
direct to the western entrance of the park. Ore- 
gon Short Line is one of the pseudonyms for 
Harriman. From Kansas City and Omaha to 
Ogden it is Union Pacific. From there to the Puget 
Sound country Oregon Short Line and Oregon Rail- 
road & Navigation. From Ogden to San Francisco, 
and way back again to New Orleans, it is Southern 
Pacific — but it is all Harriman. I do not know 
how many railroads Mr. Harriman controls. I 
am told that he is not right sure himself. There 
is a story in railroad circles that not long ago he 
called up one of his viziers. ^^Have we got the 
Start and Go Somewhere Road?" '^Sure/' says 
the vizier. ''When did we get it?" says Harriman. 
''You got it in that last trade with George Gould." 
"Humph," says Harriman, "he must have sawed 
that off on me when I wasn't looking. Well, 
anyway, there's a man here who says he is president 
of the S. & G. S., and he wants ten millions for 
improvements. Do you suppose he wants it?" 
"Mr. Harriman," says the vizier, "every railroad 
wants money." "I mean," says Harriman, "how 



20 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

much does he need?" '^If he wants ten millions 
he probably needs five and can get along with 
three." And he got it. Now, doubtless, this is a 
fairy tale. It is like the story that there are only 
two shares of stock outstanding on the Salt Lake 
& Los Angeles Railroad, the road that Senator 
Clark built out of his pocket money without 
issuing any bonds; that Clark owns one and 
Harriman the other. 

This story is undoubtedly a lie, but it is pic- 
turesque. Fancy Clark and Harriman sitting 
opposite each other and gravely moving and pass- 
ing resolutions, and then fancy what would happen 
if they did not agree. No! I deny my credulity 
to this story, though I swallow most things as a 
traveler should. The true rule of travel is to 
swallow everything and beg for more. The 
cynical, the worldly-wise, miss much that is pic- 
turesque and interesting. I know that old, hand- 
made lies are nearly all gone and the new ones are 
machine-made, not of as good wearing quality as 
the old ones; but, once in a while, you meet an artist 
who is not in a hurry, who patiently elaborates his 



DENVER AND BEYOND 21 

work till it reaches perfection, and he will not 
exhibit it to the wise ones, the sarcastic ones 
or the supercilious ones. He reserves it for simple 
souls, like myself, who are credulous and love to 
be lied to. 

The story that Mr. Harriman did not recognize 
his own road leads me to some observations on 
this new Union Pacific. When Harriman took it, 
it was bankrupt — the traditional "two streaks of 
rust and a right-of-way." It had been the play- 
thing and victim of the stock market, the looter 
and the wrecker. It had an enormous debt, but 
it was one of the great links of commerce. Its 
terminals were fine. It ran through a rich 
country. It was the first really, truly great rail- 
road that Mr. Harriman controlled, for his very 
own, with an absolutely free hand. He had a large 
hand in other railroads — a long education in trans- 
portation — but the U. P. was the first to be called 
by the now familiar name, "a, Harriman road.'' 
Not that he owned it — Mr. Harriman, I imagine, 
does not own any road — but, through affiliations 
and stock control, it was his as much as though he 



22 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

owned it. His will was law, and he started out to 
show what he could do with a railroad. So it 
has resulted that the U. P. has a peculiar place in 
Mr. Harriman's affections. It was the firstling 
of his flock, his eldest and dearest. Whatever the 
U. P. wants, it can have. He has made of it a 
great holding company with enormous interests 
in other roads, paying regular dividends, and, as to 
its present physical condition, there is nothing to 
criticise. 

I sat in the observation car with nothing to do 
but watch the ninety-pound rails slip away behind 
us without a jar or a vibration. I saw the auto- 
matic block signals rise to their warning position 
and enclose us in an invisible network of protec- 
tion through which no other train, front or rear, 
could break. I saw the right-of-way, clean as a 
lady's parlor, the magnificent ballast of Sherman 
gravel, everywhere the evidences of a trained eye, 
of supreme railroad skill, care and intelligence. 
By the way, can you recall when you have heard 
of an accident on the U. P.? Just stop and think. 
You read about railroad wrecks here and there. 



DENVER AND BEYOND 23 

but I cannot recall when I have heard of one on 
this road, and I never felt safer. I knew I was 
safe. I was surrounded by every safeguard that 
human ingenuity has invented up to date, and 
watched over by a human machine that tireless 
patience, and the weeding out of every proved 
incompetent, has brought as near perfection as a 
human machine can be made. 

The land of wheat succeeds the land of corn; 
tillage fails, and vast herds and flocks take the 
place of cultivated fields. 

Still the steel rails slip behind you, prosperous 
towns and pretentious cities alternating with the 
wild and the remote. Elk Mountain follows you 
with its great visage for fifty miles. The glories 
of Weber Caflon, the gateway of the Mormons, 
vanish. The pathway of the pioneers you are 
following rises and dips and falls, and the years 
when this trail was strewn with bleaching bones 
of toil-spent oxen, and marked with the graves of 
woman and child over-done with the stress of the 
trail, seem far away and vastly remote. And yet, 
it is barely half a century since the first great cara- 



DENVER AND BEYOND 25 

van, the exodus of the Mormons, broke through 
here, and all about you was written the history of 
those first heroic souls who dared the desert and 
the unknown. Fort Bridger is just over there, 
and over this very trail, then as remote frorn us 
as Thibet is today, thousands sought the way to 
fortune or the refuge of the desert to find but a 
wayside grave. 

As I said before, U. P. is Harriman's favorite, 
and she can have anything she asks for. Money 
is no object. Does she get a speck of dust in her 
eye, straightway the road is ballasted from end to 
end with rock. Is there a splintered rail, a tear 
in her pretty iron dress, a low joint or two, she 
must have a new suit of ninety-pound steel, sur- 
faced to a razor edge. 

Along in 1902, Miss U. P. began to whimper, 
and Mr. Harriman, in New York, heard her and 
sat up. ^^Say," he says, ^'what's the matter with 
U. P.?" ^^Wants a cutoff," says the vizier. ^^Says 
all the other roads have cutoffs and says she wants 
one." ^^Well," says Harriman, "why don't you 
fix it for her?" "She wants the Great Salt Lake 



26 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

filled up to make it." 'Till it up, then/' says 
Harriman; ''don't let the child cry for a thing like 
that." 

To understand this you must know that, when 
the U. P. was built, or rather, what is now the 
Southern Pacific, west from Ogden, it made a great 
detour around the northern end of the Great Salt 
Lake, necessitating heavy grades and a climb of 
fifteen hundred feet. For years this piece of road 
had been a heart breaker. It took two big engines 
to take twenty cars over the grade and it was forty 
miles longer than a straight line. But a straight 
line meant the Great Salt Lake Cutoff, involving 
engineering problems heretofore unsolved and 
millions of money. Harriman had the engineers, 
and could get the money, and the word went forth 
that this great inland sea should no longer be an 
obstructor of traffic. 

Ordinarily a cutoff is a simple thing. So many 
yards of dirt or rock to be removed; so many 
bridges, ties and rails. But here was the unknown. 
It was proposed to bridge thirty-four miles of 
water, to construct a double track on piles or fill, 



DENVER AND BEYOND 27 

over unknown depths and upon an unknown 
foundation. No one knew what was at the bot- 
tom of the lake — rock, sand, or mud. 

To make an air line the road runs across an arm 
of the lake, into which flows Bear River, a big, 
fresh-water stream, to Promontory Point. This 
was to be a fill; the rest of the way was to be piled. 

So an army of men was set to work — literally 
an army, larger than that which Washington com- 
manded at Yorktown. Forests were felled for 
piles and ties. The great steel mills roared and 
flared night and day for months. A fleet of 
barges, tug boats, launches and steamers plied the 
once deserted waters. Gnomes attacked a moun- 
tain range, and with pick and drill, and engine and 
gin and dynamite bit and tore and hammered and 
worried it down into the lake depths. And, day 
by day, the lake swallowed it up — casually, easily, 
with the same smiling, dancing, rippling face. 
Tons, thousands of tons, of rock disappeared with- 
out a sign, till there came a day when islands 
began to appear along the fill. The bottom was a 
spongy mud and, when the rock began to sink, it 



28 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

was like pressing your hand in a pan of dough: 
on either side the dough is forced up. They felt 
encouraged. They had made an impression. The 
lake no longer smiled casually and cheerfully. 
Day by day those sullen, sinister-looking islands 
of gray primeval ooze and slime grew and length- 
ened. Then one night the lake rose and tore 
away the moored piles, anchored craft and pile- 
drivers and scattered them to the last corner of 
the lake. It took weeks to recover the scattered 
material. Water for every purpose had to be 
hauled a hundred miles. On the pile part piles 
had to be spliced thrice to stand. The mud lay 
in strata with floors of hard shale between. 

It was endless, heart-breaking work, yet it 
proceeded rapidly and, at the end of two years, 
it was finished. The fill was full; the piles com- 
plete. Straight away, at a water level, for thirty- 
four miles, stretched four steel ribands. The ends 
were connected. It remained but to drive the 
last spike, and the Great Salt Lake was con- 
quered. They wired Harriman, shook hands with 
each other, and went to bed. 



DENVER AND BEYOND 29 

The next morning they awoke to find that the 
Bear River had quietly taken its own again. The 
beautiful roadbed, ties and rails, as well as some 
equipment, were in the lake. One of those floors 
had given away again and let the whole right-of- 
way down into the lake. 

Right then and there, if I had been on the job, 
I would have cussed the whole thing comprehen- 
sively, wired my resignation and tackled some- 
thing that promised completion before Time and 
Eternity got mixed up. But these boys were not 
built that way. They looked at each other and 
said, "Well, that's h — 1, ain't it?" spat on their 
hands and went to work again. They selected 
another nice-looking, handy mountain range, 
and proceeded to tear it down and spill it into the 
lake. 

In the meanwhile word had to come to the Pres- 
ident, who is the ex-officio keeper of the scenery of 
the U. S., that Mr. Harriman was misplacing a lot 
of his 'scenery. The matter was referred to the 
department for the protection of pinochle and 
other wild game of America, which immediately 

3 



30 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

selected a competent young man to investigate. 
I say ^'competent/' advisedly. He was a graduate 
of Pungtown University, had studied pinochle at 
close range in Milwaukee, and spent two years 
among the mountain ranges of Chicago. 

He was two years investigating the matter, and 
his report, published by that celebrated publishing 
house, ''Government Printing Office," may be 
found in the basement of almost any public build- 
ing. Following a time-honored precedent, the 
report was not filed till the work was finished. 
And finished it was. At last Bear River was con- 
quered. The last lump of nasty gray mud was 
squeezed out of its depths. Rock met rock and 
there the road was, and there it is. 

I saw it, and you may get a fair idea of it from 
the illustrations. At midlake, in one direction, 
you cannot see land, and on every side it is far 
away and dim. And I saw one engine haul one 
hundred and ten loaded cars across it with ease. 
One hundred and ten, instead of two engines to 
twenty cars. That was what the cutoff was for, 
as well as saving forty-three miles and two hours 



DENVER AND BEYOND 31 

time across the continent. That is the shibboleth 
of the U. P. The shortest Hne and the lowest 
grades. That is all they want. The best is good 
enough for them. And they are getting it in 
many other ways and places. Everywhere we 
went we saw curves straightened, fills and cuts 
and tunnels through the solid rock to reduce 
grades. It is a plain matter of calculation. So 
much money spent will save so much in moving 
the traffic. ''Then spend the money and be 
quick about it." Today, what was the poor old 
busted Union Pacific, that ruined so many fortunes 
and blasted so many reputations, that was a 
jest and a byword, compares with any railroad in 
the country — indeed, with any in the world. 
Travel over it is no task in that magnificent gliding 
hotel. The Overland • Limited, where you have 
every comfort and are borne on the magic carpet 
from wonderland to wonderland. And it opens 
up that wonderland of all the wonders, Yellow- 
stone Park. 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 



33 



QllfavUv 2 





NLY ABOUT BEARS 



EFORE my visit to the Yellow- 
stone, I had known, intimately, 
but one bear. Now I am on 
speaking terms with more than 
a hundred of the most refined, 
intelligent and cultivated bears 
in the world. Hence the title of this book. They 
are real 'Agents," everyone of them, and you shall 
hear all about their gentness if you will but listen. 
I have mentioned that I once knew a bear, Mose 
Lewis by name. To know him was to love him. 
To know him was a liberal education in bearness. 
Such was his nature, so comprehensive, so uni- 
versal, such his intelligence, that he might well 
pass as the model of all bears. Long association 
with me had not marred his bear nature nor 
spoiled him. He remained till the last a bear — 



34 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

in fact, toward the last, he became more and more 
of a bear. Bears do that as they grow older. 
Poor Mose died of tooth trouble. He bit his 
master and was killed. He had bitten a number 
of other people, which did not particularly matter. 
They were there handy, and Mose had to bite 
something ; but, when he bit the old man, something 
happened. Mose also was typical, in that he was 
a black bear, the commonest and most numerous 
of the bear family, and found more or less every- 
where except within the Arctic Circle. 

Sometimes their coloring shades off to brown, 
or tawny, and the uninformed call them^ cinna- 
mons. But President Roosevelt, who ought to 
know, says that they belong to the same family, 
a mere aberrance from type. Some nature fakirs 
dispute this, but I stay by the President because 
I voted for him. A man who knows the octopus, 
however disguised, and who has killed more 
octopi (I am a little doubtful of that plural) than 
any other man, living or dead, is good enough 
authority for me. 



36 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

To return to Mose. He was taken quite young 
as the result of an accident that happened to his 
mother, and was carried a hundred miles in a 
wagon, nourished on crackers and condensed milk. 
That he survived the latter shows the strength of 
of his constitution. In the roomy home that 
Mose entered was a tame prairie dog, one of the 
most delightful of household pets, by the way. 
One would think that friendly commerce between 
such natures would be impossible, but in fact 
they became great friends, for the prairie dog 
soon discovered Mose's tender point, his nose, 
and rejected too great familiarity with a swipe in 
the right place that always sent Mose under the 
bed to whimper for an hour. His favorite amuse- 
ment was a roomy rocking-chair. He would 
scramble to the top of it and swing back and for- 
ward by the hour, till a disregard of the laws of 
gravity would send him over and he always lit on 
his nose. Most of the time he went around nurs- 
ing his nose and asking sympathy for it. He 
grew amazingly. Abundant food brought out the 
beautiful glossiness of his black coat and all the 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 37 

mischief in him. He ate everything, including old 
clothes and pipes. A particularly strong one that 
he found in Mac's pocket made him sick, and 
never afterward could he endure the smell of 
tobacco. One of his favorite tricks was cleverly to 
knock a pipe from one's mouth and then scramble 
away. 

Like all bears, he had a passion for sweets. 
Candy or a lump of sugar would command his 
affectionate attention any time. One day I 
rolled him out an old-fashioned molasses keg and 
he spent a whole forenoon trying to get a two-inch 
muzzle into an inch hole. Finally I broke it up 
and Mose spent the next week licking the staves. 
When he had finished, even the Sugar Trust could 
not have gotten anything from that keg. 

In spite of his civilized surroundings he 
remained a wild thing. He was weather wise and 
knew when storms were coming. He had a com- 
fortable house, but a snow-storm, twenty-four 
hours off, would set him digging industriously to 
prepare for it. The sign never failed. Well fed 
and sure of his future, he ceased to hibernate. 



38 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

In fact, hibernation is only an instinct of preser- 
vation against winter, the deep snows, the star- 
vation time. Bears in the South do not hiber- 
nate, and, on the other hand, many tropical ani- 
mals, and even reptiles, estivate : bury themselves 
somewhere against the heat of summer and its 
dangers. 

Mose, as I have said, ate everything, but always 
retained his baby taste for milk. Every day a 
fresh full pail was given him and he would lie for 
hours slowly sipping it, licking his chops and 
savoring it like a connoisseur. The pigs annoyed 
him greatly by insisting on a share of his milk. 
Well-aimed slaps, that sent them tumbling, failing 
to repulse them, he would pick the pail up in his 
front paws and handily carry it and set it down 
in his house, where no pig dared approach. 

One day, in the summer, we heard an awful 
row upstairs. Mose had climbed the veranda 
and tried to enter the house by a chamber window 
that had been lowered from the top. There he 
was stuck, half in and half out, bawling for help. 
He would not back out and it took four of us to 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 39 

drag him through. He refused to descend the 
stairs until a piece of cake tempted him. Mose 
would have followed a piece of cake straight up 
to Roosevelt's gun. 

Poor old Mose! I never tired of talking to 
him; with his bear head cocked on one side and his 
little black eyes following the movement of my 
lips, he would listen as though he understood, but, 
in fact, waiting, for he knew that he would get a 
lump of sugar before the confab ended. 

The farmhands teased him. He grew grad- 
ually morose, ugly and dangerous, and then his 
end came. The household was in mourning for a 
week. 

Moved by interest in Mose, I made a study of 
bears, sought their society wherever I could, and 
am told that I have gained much from them, 
especially as to my manners before breakfast. 
Of course, I am no expert, simply a catechumen; 
but I know a heap of things about bears, and, when 
I heard of the bears in the Yellowstone, they 
decided me. 



40 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

For you must know that, in the Yellowstone, 
bears are as the autumn leaves in that Spanish 
place, the name of which I forget just now. The 
Park has many other things, geysers of all sorts, 
streams, water-falls, mountains, rocks and canons; 
but the unique thing about the Park, the thing 
best worth while, most worth a visit, is the 
animals. For there the world-old war between 
man and his fellow animals is ended. It is not 
a truce nor an armistice. It is peace — lasting, 
final, well understood capitulations signed, sealed 
and duly observed by the stronger party. There, 
alone, of all the wdld places of the earth, the wild 
are free from fear. There is no ^^open season." 
No gun may be fired in the Park, nor even 
carried, save by those who are duly authorized. 

The Park is policed by a small force of scouts, 
who remain throughout the year, and in the sum- 
mer by two troops of cavalry. None other may 
carry a gun. Since 'eighty-eight this prohibition 
has been enforced strenuously, and more than one 
poacher has spent a term in Fort Yellowstone for 
violating this fundamental law of the Park. 



42 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

MacBride is the head scout. He has been there 
thirty years, nearly. He knows every foot of it 
and every animal in it. He has the power of the 
high, the low, and the middle, justice: power of 
life and death over its wild citizens. A quiet man, 
big and silent like his habitat, with something of 
the free wildness of his friends. Mostly in his 
patrol he sticks to the trails and, day and night, 
the year 'round, rides his lonely way looking for 
poachers, for imprudent campers who do not 
quench their fires, observing the wild things and 
their doings and welfare. Once in a while you 
will find him, in his forest clothes, in one of the 
great hotels, rolling and smoking endless cigar- 
ettes and observing the foolish ways of civiliza- 
tion. And then, if you can get *him to talk, it is 
worth a trip across the continent. 

His old calico saddle horse is as well known to the 
animals of the Park as are their feeding grounds. 
He can ride through a band of elk without their 
lifting a head. He knows the good bears and the 
bad ones. In winter, with the other scouts, he 
goes on snow shoes, for his patrol must be kept up, 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 43 

as winter is the best time for the poachers. A 
good buffalo head^ mounted, is worth a thousand 
dollars today, and the skin three hundred; so a 
couple of kills is worth a big risk. Not long ago a 
desperado got in and killed eight of them before 
MacBride caught him. He is spending two years 
in Yellowstone jail with a fine on top of it. 

Occasionally a bear gets old, ugly, dangerous, 
or commits some depredation, some infraction of 
the Park law, and then MacBride is sent for. Not 
long ago an old black bear, after making himself 
a nuisance by depredations on camping parties, 
distinguished himself by killing a cow belong- 
ing to the Canon Hotel. And here comes in a 
curious rule of the Park. No animal may be shot 
within sight or sound of another. To do so would 
seem a violation of the treaty. It would destroy 
their confidence, upset the whole scheme, and 
break in on their education. So MacBride had the 
half-eaten carcass left, knowing the bear would 
return. Half the night he watched till he got the 
criminal, and by morning there was nothing left 
to show that justice had been done. For when a 



44 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

bear, or any other wild animal, is killed, every part 
of it must be burned. They may not even pre- 
serve the beautiful hide. To do so would incite 
the suspicion that sometimes they are killed for 
the hide. You may think, as a tourist that the 
rules are strict for you, but they are even stricter 
for the guardians of the Park; and there is one 
rule for all. 

Again MacBride comes in. Two years ago a 
fresh young man from Chicago was stopping at 
the Caiion Hotel. He went out in the woods with 
his wife and, "just for fun," chased a silver-tip cub 
up a tree, and, "just for fun," prodded it with his 
umbrella till it bawled for mamma. Mamma came. 
With one neat swipe she tore out the young man's 
breast-bone and part of a lung. He lived five 
days. MacBride was sent for to kill the mother 
bear. But no -animal may be executed without 
a hearing, without his day in court. The trial 
was a scene unique in the justice of the world. 
The defendant was not present in court nor rep- 
resented by counsel, but MacBride, who was judge, 
and executioner if she were condemned, was there 
to see justice done to his forest friends. 



46 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

The prosecution demanded the death of the cul- 
prit. She had broken the forest law and must 
be killed. She was a danger to the public — 
an outlaw. MacBride listened patientl}^ He 
cross-examined the witnesses. He showed that 
the victim was, himself, violating the forest law in 
chasing the cub; that he was the unprovoked and 
wanton aggressor; that the mother bear had every 
reason to suppose that her cub was in imminent 
danger. Following a sacred instinct in defense of 
her young, she had exercised the right that belongs 
to all animals in the Park, that of self-defense. 
To punish this instinct, to pronounce her guilty, 
would be a violation of the treaty, would set aside 
the forest law in favor of one who, by his own 
act, had placed himself beyond its protection, and 
would make one law for the animals of the Park 
and another for man. MacBride refused to do it. 
He held to the forest law and acquitted the 
defendant. It was forest justice. 

Do you wonder that these wild beings of the 
Park know him and trust him and are secure in 
his justice? So well they know it, that even the 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 47 

Canada goose, the wildest of the migratory birds, 
is as tame as a barnyard fowl. I got a snapshot 
of a flock within a hundred feet. How do they 
know — what mysterious instinct tells them — that 
here, alone, of all the spots from the Gulf of 
Mexico to the Arctic Circle, they are safe? 

I felt like Alexander Selkirk. 

"Their tameness was shocking to me." 

The woodchuck, dozing on the rail of the wooden 
bridge, looks at you with sleepy russet eyes, as you 
pass within a foot of him, never stirring. A bear 
lumbers across the road, a few feet in front of you, 
with an expression that says, as plain as words, 
''You lemme alone; you don't dast to tech me." 

The elk, the deer and the antelope hardly raise 
their heads from grazing as you pass. One day, 
walking, I passed within ten feet of a mother deer 
and two fawns with mottled sides gleaming in the 
sun. She moved off a few steps, but the fawns 
looked at me with their great velvety eyes, and 
one scratched her ear with her tiny hoof, as she con- 
templated me, and then went on grazing. In the 
winter, the antelope congregate by the hundreds 



48 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

about the Hot Springs Hotel and are fed on 
alfalfa. Day in and day out, the scouts patrol the 
Park and watch for cripples or old animals that 
may die of starvation. You may not, if camping, 
leave a tin can unburied, because sometimes a bear, 
in search of its contents, gets its nose stuck in its 
ragged opening. The Government does every- 
thing but furnish hair mattresses and wash basins 
for them. 

The badger, wildest of his kind, sits at his door- 
way and looks at you as unafraid as a baby pup. 
The bald eagle gazes at you from a dead branch 
within easy snapshot, with his tired, dead eyes, 
that seem as old as the world. The chipmunks 
fill the woods with their chatter. Squirrels dance 
above your head, and all the multitudinous life 
of the forest goes and comes, regardless of you, 
unfearing. Is it not wonderful? They know that 
you are not there to kill and wound and rend 
them. You are not there to secure another rug 
or pair of spreading antlers that attest the sureness 
of your eye. You are just friends with them — 
just there to watch them, enjoy them, maybe 
to feed them, but surely not to harm them. 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 49 

Up in the northeastern corner of the Park, off 
the beaten highway, is a little camp — Camp Roose- 
velt. It is not much sought except by the initiate 
(I shall tell you more about it later), but herel really 
became acquainted with a Yellowstone bear. We 
arrived for late lunch spread in a tent. About five 
o'clock an old cinnamon and her cub came down to 
the garbage pile, for their supper, perhaps a hundred 
yards from our sleeping tent. We walked down 
to see her. She sent the cub up first, then fol- 
lowed, up a big Douglas spruce, sat there twenty 
feet from the ground and watched us, unafraid 
but declining to associate with us. I sent Dud- 
geon up a nearby tree to get a snapshot of her, 
but she managed to get the tree between herself 
and the camera. After a while we retired a little 
way and she came down and resumed her supper. 
Presently came stealing around, furtive, shy, 
timid, my bear — the one bear that I claim for my 
very own out of the Hundred. Poor little Billy 
Bear approached with such an humble counte- 
nance, with such insinuating small whinings, ex- 
pressive of hunger, that it would have melted the 



50 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

heart of anything but a mother bear with a cub. 
The cinnamon charged him instantly and drove 
him to the thick woods. By and by he came 
steahng in from a different quarter. But, alas for 
Billy! he came out upon a corral where a brindle 
cow guarded her calf. She charged him, horns 
down. Billy gave one despairing look at her 
and climbed a tree. For a half-hour Brindle 
brandished her horns under him, threatening 
evisceration if he dared to descend, till called off for 
feeding and milking. Bill descended supperless. 
Forlorn and empty he wandered away. In the 
night I was awakened by him, twice, rubbing 
against my bed. It was just against the wall of 
the tent and in the half-light his bulk showed who 
it was. The second time I kicked him hard and 
he gave the same protesting little whine and went 
away. 

The next morning at early breakfast I looked 
out the back door of the dining tent and there was 
Bill, straddling the swill barrel, holding by its edge 
with three paws and fishing for breakfast with the 
other. Mind you, ten feet from us. When his 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 



51 



black paw emerged with some 
morsel that suited him he 
would eat it, regarding us grave- 
ly, searching the sky and the 
nearby door of the cook tent 
for possible interrup- 
tions. I hurried my 
breakfast and, with a 
handful of doughnuts, 
went out to make 
friends. At first he 
regarded me with sus- 
picion, but a piece of 
doughnut thrown within tempting dis- 
tance conquered him. His expression 
when, for the first time, he savored 
that delicacy simply cannot be de- 
scribed. A combination of surprise, 
ecstasy and thankfulness. We were 
friends. He regarded me the god from 
the machine, edged about me, closer 
and closer, as the morsels fell nearer my 
feet. I am sure no one had ever fed 



^t, <^»r "^ / 



:( 




52 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

him doughnuts before. It was a dietetic reve- 
lation. It was something new, and, as such, he 
investigated me, with his black head atilt, his 
black eyes glistening, till at last he took doughnuts 
from my hand. At first, he scampered away as 
soon as he secured one, but soon he was ^^eating 
out of my hand" — think of it! a wild bear, fresh 
from the wild woods. And just then, just when 
I had his confidence, the old cook lady happened 
out of the kitchen and, seeing him, banged the 
gong and frightened him away. I remonstrated 
with her and she said, ''Them pesky bears just 
bother me to death." Poor Billy! I suppose 
that in your brief life you never had anything 
as good as doughnuts. I doubt if you were ever 
quite full fed. I suppose you were always more 
or less hungry and, just when you had made a 
friend, and were looking down long vistas of 
doughnuts and such like grub, a fat Irish cook 
destroyed the dream. Doubtless you think that 
cook is some kin of mine — a friend, at least. 
Take this assurance that she is not. She inter- 
rupted love's young dream for me and, with a 



MAINLY ABOUT BEARS 53 

miserable gong that did not cost over fifty cents, 
annihilated one of the most promising friendships 
that I have ever known. 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 55 



^hapiev a. 



m SALT LAKE a.^^^ MORMONS 

^J^|/^^)r ERTAINLY you will not pass by 
^.^^f^^^\S^ S^l^ Lake when in Ogden. It is 
^^^^^Pt^ but forty miles south of Ogden 
^^^^^^^. and, on many accounts, one of 
^^p^y^^^V the most interesting cities on the 
^""^^ ^^^ continent. 

I do not know why — it was foolish — but some- 
how I had expected to find the Mormons differ- 
ent in appearance from other people; somehow 
marked and set aside and easily distinguishable. 
Of course, they are not. I had forgotten that 
much of that which distinguished the Mormons of 
an earlier day has passed, been modified or entirely 
foregone. That as a church today it does not, in its 
doctrines, differ greatly from other Christian sects. 
That railroads, travel, the influx of gentiles, 



56 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

have all combined to abolish the idiosyncrasies 
that, for many years, made the ^^peculiar people" 
a favorite mark for jesters and alleged hu- 
morists. 

I found Salt Lake a beautiful city, beauti- 
fully placed, with wide, airy streets, an air of 
thrift and business, but, above all, scrupulously 
clean. I do not know anywhere of so clean a 
great city. Down each side of the main streets 
runs a little thread of water fresh from the moun- 
tains, and the streets are swept — one might almost 
say mopped — daily. 

Of course, among your first objects of interest 
will be the Temple and the Tabernacle. The 
former you may not enter. None but Mormons 
in good standing are admitted to this sacred place, 
but you may admire its noble proportions, its 
architectural excellence, from every viewpoint, 
and wonder at its history. When Brigham 
Young set his foot down and said, ^^Here we will 
build a new Zion," one of the first things to be 
done was to select a site for the great Temple. For 
forty years the building went on, never hurried 



58 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

but never ceasing. The rich gave money, the 
poor gave labor; but all contributed, each accord- 
ing to his means. The stone was hauled fifty 
miles, mostly by ox teams. In the meanwhile, the 
Tabernacle was used as an auditorium, which, by 
the way, is one of the most remarkable edifices 
in the world. Everyone has seen a picture of it: 
the turtle-back roof, which is unique in architec- 
ture, self-sustaining without a supporting pillar in 
that vast auditorium — so vast that, standing by 
the entrance, you cannot distinguish faces on the 
platform, and yet the faintest whisper from there 
will reach you, making itself audible in any part 
of the building. At noon, each day, an organ 
recital is given on the great organ, the pride of 
the Church and one of the largest and finest in 
the world. The Mormons believe in music and 
dancing. There is nothing cold or chilly about 
their creed. They do not believe in meriting 
heaven by making earth a hell. David danced — 
why not Brigham Young? Tradition records that 
the latter was a lusty dancer, and taught his 
followers that music and dancing were harmless 
and acceptable. 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 59 

The organist of this church is one of the 
masters of his art, educated abroad at Church 
expense, so that the Mormons may have the best 
music there is. Every Httle Mormon settlement 
has its band and orchestra, and, whether in days of 
plenty or hours of famine, concerts and dances 
are encouraged. 

No people has had a more singular history than 
this; none has been more maligned, misrepre- 
sented and libeled. The Mormons have had their 
faults; some things in their religion were distaste- 
ful to us; some things in their history can not be 
excused. But it must be said that the things relig- 
ious, to which we object, have been eliminated, 
and the matters of history that are without excuse 
had, at least, terrible provocation. 

Pardon a word or two historical to clear up a 
few of the many misconceptions about this people. 

Of course, you all know that Joseph Smith found 
the Book of Mormon, written upon plates of gold, 
in the hill of Cumorah, near the town of Palmyra, 
New York, in 1823. 



60 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

He alleged that he was directed to the finding 
by the angel Moroni, who was the son of 
the prophet Mormon, the last leader of the 
Nephites, with whose history the Book of Mormon 
is principally concerned. 

The book contained records of the wanderings 
of the Jeredites and Nephites for a period of 
several thousand years, added to from time to 
time. It was written in characters pronounced 
by, at least, one scholar of repute, to be Hebrew of 
an archaic type. At different times the plates 
were exhibited to eight different witnesses, all men 
of probity and good reputation, who, later, attested 
that they had seen and handled the plates. About 
this book there long raged a great controversy. 
It was alleged that it was a plagiarism from a 
romafice written by an itinerant minister, one 
Spaulding. It is now conceded that there was no 
foundation for this story, and the origin of the 
Book, to all but Mormons, remains a mystery. Cer- 
tainly Joseph Smith, an unlearned man, could 
hardly have written it. Disregarding the contro- 
versy as to its origin, the Book forms an interesting 
contribution to religious literature. 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 61 

Of the two nations whose history is recorded 
in the various plates, the Jeredites were first in 
time. They fled from the Tower of Babel, after 
the confusion of tongues, and were led across a 
great water, finally landing at some point near the 
Gulf of California. Here they grew, flourished 
and became a great nation, but eventually, 
because of their wickedness and idolatries, were 
totally destroyed. 

The Nephites left Jerusalem, about 600, B. C, 
under the leadership of Lehi, of the Hebrew tribe 
of Manasseh. By revelation he was taught to 
build a ship, in which he set sail and landed at a 
point near the site of Valparaiso, South America. 

After the death of Lehi there was a division, 
one branch taking for its leader Laman, the 
oldest son of Lehi, and the other Nephi, a younger 
son, who had been duly appointed to the prophetic 
office. 

Thenceforth there was war between the two, 
the Lamanites finally exterminating the Nephites 
in a great battle waged on the hill of Cumorah, 
about 400, A. D. The last of the Nephites 



62 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

was Moroni, who wrote the latter portion of the 
book and concealed it where he, later, revealed its 
resting place to Joseph Smith. 

Upon these books, as a new revelation. Smith 
founded the Mormon church, the ^Thurch of the 
Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ." 

Recognizing both the Old and New Testaments, 
engrafting upon them the Book of Mormon, there 
has grown up a great religious organization that, 
today, numbers more than a half- million thrifty, 
contented and happy people. Is it all a delusion? 

Of course, such a story could not but excite the 
ridicule and derision of the many, but it found 
converts and followers among the few. Steadily, 
if slowly, its numbers grew and everywhere its 
members were persecuted. Understand there was 
nothing of polygamy in the earlier history of the 
Church. This doctrine was never sanctioned 
publicly till after the expulsion from Nauvoo, 
although, shortly before his death, it had been 
given out privately by Smith and practiced by 
him and others in the Church. 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 63 

It is hard to account for the horrible cruelties 
that were perpetrated upon these people every- 
where. They were moral, law-abiding, good 
citizens. Until about 1845, there was absolutely 
nothing in their doctrines or observances that 
could offend the conscience of any Christian. 
They were mostly of New England stock — as good 
blood as America holds — and the ancestors of 
three-fifths of them had fought in the Revolution. 
But, driven by persecution from New York and 
Ohio, they founded a settlement in Jackson 
County, Missouri. As everywhere, they pros- 
pered, accumulated wealth, but they remained a 
peculiar people. They did not mingle much or 
intermarry with their neighbors. They were 
viewed with suspicion and finally driven out by 
armed ruffians, their property taken, their homes 
despoiled, and nameless outrages committed upon 
their women. They settled again in Clay County 
under an express promise of protection from the 
governor. Again they were driven out under the 
same circumstances of outrage and cruelty. Many 
were killed, and many more died of sickness and 
privation. 



64 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Unwavering in their faith, they congregated at 
Nauvoo, on the Mississippi, in the State of Illinois, 
and there, believing that they had found a law- 
abiding government that would protect them, 
built up a beautiful and prosperous city that num- 
bered nearly twenty thousand people at the time of 
the exodus. 

The Mormons began to take part in politics. 
Holding the balance of power, they contributed 
to the election of Stephen A. Douglass to the 
Senate. In 1840, they supported Harrison as 
against Van Buren. The fires of persecution were 
again being kindled. Requisitions came from 
Missouri for Smith, but he was still strong enough 
to resist them. With this growing power, however, 
Smith, who had been a great leader, began to 
lose his sense of proportion. The doctrine of 
polygamy was secretly given out as a revelation 
and practiced by a few. He organized the Nauvoo 
Legion, with himself as lieutenant-general. In 
1844, he ran for President of the United States. 
More and more the Mormons, solidified by the 
terrible pressure from without, began to modify 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 65 

their government, until it became known as one of 
the most despotic hierarchies the world has ever 
known. Allegiance to the Church was first before 
all earthly governments. Events moved quickly. 
The destruction of a gentile newspaper, in Nauvoo, 
by the orders of Smith, precipitated a conflict. 
Joseph, his brother Hyrum, and two others, finally 
surrendered, under a solemn assurance of Gov- 
ernor Ford that they would be protected and have 
a fair trial. They were taken to Carthage and 
there, on the night of June 27, 1844, were taken 
from jail, by the troops sent to protect them, set 
against a wall of the jail and shot without trial. 

The expulsion from Nauvoo followed. Without 
trial or hearing, without even the form of law, 
they were driven out of their homes in midwinter, 
and their property confiscated, accompanied by 
circumstances of oppression, cruelty and insult 
that seem incredible. 

Not long ago, the American conscience was 
revolted by Russian persecution of the Jews. But 
here in this fair land of ours, in the middle of the 
nineteenth century, those very crimes were par- 
alelled upon people of our own blood. 



66 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

The exiles formed a temporary camp at Council 
Bluffs, Iowa, where they spent the winter of 
1846-47. And here is a curious thing: From out 
of that camp of exiles, driven from the country 
for which their forefathers had fought, and ex- 
pelled from their homes, a volunteer company 
was formed that fought bravely for the flag 
throughout the Mexican War. Despite their 
wrongs, their love of country was inexpugnable. 

From Council Bluffs, the next spring, the first 
great exodus set out, and that summer their first 
settlement was made at what is now Salt Lake 
City. A more barren, unpromising site could 
hardly have been chosen. But Brigham Young, 
who had succeeded Smith, was far-sighted. 
Already planning that great organization, a com- 
bination of the Catholic hierarchy and the Stan- 
dard Oil, he wanted a free hand. If he settled in 
a desirable region, the gentiles would take it from 
him. With absolute faith in his own genius as a 
colonizer and in the thrift and industry of his 
people, he took the barren sagebrush valley for 
the future home of the Saints. How well he 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 67 

chose the world knows, and their subsequent 
history, their abortive resistance to the United 
States, their final submission to the Edmunds 
Law, and the abohtion of polygamy, their won- 
derful success and great wealth, are matters of 
common knowledge. 

In that early history of theirs in Utah, there is 
much we would wish blotted out. They did 
wrong, but no greater wrongs than had been 
visited on them by the gentiles. They disobeyed 
the law, they took vengeance into their own hands, 
but not until the law had failed to save them from 
spoliation, outrage and death. Let us balance 
the account. It was a religious war, always the 
most horrible. It is ended now, and that peaceful, 
wealthy valley, and a hundred others, throughout 
Utah and the nearby States, attest the thrift and 
husbandry of these people. 

It was,- perhaps, fortunate for the Church that 
Smith was killed. His martyrdom sealed, his 
faith atoned for much that might be condemned, 
and gave them for a leader the greatest colonizer 
the world has ever seen. Brigham Young was no 



68 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



visionary. Believing in the power of the Church, 
using revelation where necessary, he was the 
guide, organizer and father of his people. When 




MONUMENT TO BRIGHAM YOUNG, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH. 

their hearts were faint, he prayed with them. 
When they were downcast, he told funny stories 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 69 

and cracked rude jokes. Everything, from the 
^^set of an ox-bow to the setting up of a stocking," 
he knew and ordered. Of vast physical and men- 
tal power, indomitable, far-sighted, he ruled his 
people with an unquestioned authority that has 
not been surpassed in any age. The testimony 
to his work is there today; and, if you wish to 
know the real Mormons, go to Salt Lake, visit 
their schools and colleges, see their homes, watch 
their pleasures — then tell me if there is not some- 
thing great, something profound and lasting, in 
this Mormon faith. 

Here are its leading Articles of Faith, estab- 
lished by the First Prophet, and approved 
universally by the Church: 

"We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in 
His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost." 

"We believe that men will be punished for their 
own sins, and not for Adam's transgression." 

"We believe that, through the atonement of 
Christ, all mankind may be saved by obedience to 
the laws and ordinances of the Gospel." 

"We believe that the first principles and ordi- 



70 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

nances of the Gospel are : First, Faith in the Lord 
Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism 
by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, 
Laying on of Hands for the Gift of the Holy 
Ghost." 

^'We believe in the same organization that 
existed in the primitive church, namely, apostles, 
prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, etc." 

^'We believe the Bible to be the word of God, 
so far as it is translated correctly; we also believe 
the Book of Mormon to be the word of God." 

"We believe that God has revealed all that He 
does now reveal, and we believe that he will yet 
reveal many great and important things per- 
taining to the Kingdom of God." 

"We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty 
God according to the dictates of our conscience, 
and allow all men the same privilege, let them 
worship how, where or what they may." 

"We believe in being subject to kings, presi- 
dents, rulers and magistrates, in obeying, honor- 
ing and sustaining the law." 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 71 

'^We believe in being honest, true, chaste, 
benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; 
indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition 
of Paul, 'We beheve all things, w^e hope all things. 
we have endured many things, and hope to be 
able to endure all things. If there is anything 
virtuous, lovely, or of good report, or praise- 
worthy, we seek after these things.'" 

I think it will be hard for any Christian sect to 
find fault with this declaration. I think it will be 
hard to find any Christian sect that more nearly 
lives up to its creed and puts its faith into works. 
It has justified itself. It is one of the great 
Churches of the world today; and, reassured by 
results, by character, thrift, home building, good 
citizenship, education, charity, or any of the stand- 
ards of human life, it deserves the great place it 
has won for itself. 

A word as to its church government. I have 
spoken of it as a combination of the Roman 
Hierarchy and the Standard Oil. On the church 
side, it has perfected an organization that is 
unequaled. The Church is parceled into 



72 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

'^stakes," each presided over by an Elder of the 
Order of Melchizedek, or Superior Priesthood. Of 
this order, there are the three members of the 
First Presidency, who are over all; then the 
Twelve Apostles, two hundred Patriarchs, 6,800 
High Priests, 9,780 Seventies, and 20,000 Elders. 
Below them in rank are more than 25,000 of the 
Lesser Priesthood. In the whole Church govern- 
ment there are more than 60,000, of all ranks. 

The priesthood is something more than relig- 
ious. It is secular, advisory in business affairs, 
regulating charity and the assistance of the poor; 
assisting in every way the material concerns of 
the members. From a system of tithes, the 
Church has built up great possessions. In spite 
of the vast confiscation enforced by the Govern- 
ment, under the Edmunds Law, the Church is still 
enormously rich, its credit of the highest; and its 
funds are systematically and wisely used to pro- 
mote education, relieve distress from poverty and 
sickness, and to extend its missionary work in 
every country on the globe. 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 73 

From the outset, Mormonism was one. The 
rich must help the poor, and the strong must 
help the weak. To that, more than anything else, 
must be attributed the wonderful thrift of these 
people. Wherever they have settled, whether in 
the fat lands of Missouri and Illinois, or the deserts 
of Idaho and Arizona, the result has been the same. 
Poverty is almost unknown among them, because 
of this solidarity and this mutual helpfulness. 

Of course, you will go to Saltair, on the Lake. 
I have no desire to be guide-bookish, but I am told 
that the dancing pavilion will accommodate 1,000 
people on its floor at once. This does not interest 
me. If my partner is right, I should not care 
about the other 998. The bathing is unique. 
You cannot swim: the safe way is to sit up in the 
water, as you would in a chair, and just bob around. 
If you try to swim, your heels come up and your 
head goes down. A curious place, this Dead Sea 
of the Rockies. Once it covered the whole valley; 
then it shrank to almost nothing; then some cen- 
turies of increased rainfall swelled it to its pres- 
ent proportions. It has some fresh water tribu- 



SALT LAKE AND THE MORMONS 75 

taries like Bear River, but with no outlet it 
grows steadily more briny. Already they are 
beginning to utilize its saline qualities with great 
evaporating pans, and, some day, this will be a 
great industry. 

More and more the Church is losing its peculiar 
position, sloughing off that which distinguished 
it, and, more and more, politics tend to divide on 
other tha.n church lines. It is a good thing. The 
isolation of the Church is, perhaps, the leading 
cause of its past persecutions. Nothing else can 
account for it. As it tends to modernize, to 
become an integral part of the life about it, more 
ecclesiastical and less political, it will accommodate 
itself to modern thought and take its place among 
the great sects of the world. 

Its days of persecution are past. Its need for 
isolation is ended. With its organization, brains 
and ideals, it will be a great force for progress. 
When it forsook polygamy it justified itself. 

It showed that it was not a dead body, but a 
living growth ready to meet living problems with 
a live faith. For myself, I saw but little to crit- 
icise and much to admire. 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 



77 



^l^apUv 4^ 





HISTORICAL ^^ OTHERWISE 

!HE North American Indians, with 
their lofty imaginations and fine 
sense of imagery, often gave a 
nomenclature to natural objects 
that the Caucasian has never 
surpassed. To the Yellowstone 
Park region they gave the title of the '' Summit 
of the World." No one has been able to improve 
on that. Compared to it the "Backbone of the 
Continent" is vulgar and puerile. 

Simply as a watershed, it deserves the name. 
Wandering through it, turning and retreating 
upon itself in a sinuous line, is the Continental 
Divide, from which streams flow to both great 
oceans and to the Gulf of California. 

The Madison and Gallatin rivers, gathering 
their floods on these plateaus and debouching 



78 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

on the north, reach the Missouri and, through 
nearly five thousand miles of wandering, dis- 
charge their melted snows into the Gulf of Mexico. 

Green River, the principal tributary of the 
Colorado of the West, breaking through the 
southern barriers, finally loses itself in the Gulf 
of California. 

On the west, the Snake, the great southern 
tributary of the Columbia River, augmented by 
countless streams, swells the giant flood that 
overwhelms the great tides of the Pacific and makes 
its way, by channels innumerable, to the western 
ocean. 

At the very summit lies a tiny basin. Two Ocean 
Pond, whose like is not elsewhere. Perhaps three 
hundred yards long and fifty feet wide, from one 
end it drains by the Snake into the Pacific and, at 
the other, by the Missouri into the Atlantic. 

That is the true Continental Divide. All the 
others are imitations. 

Here, alone, the vagrant drop, nioved by some 
tiny draught of air, may find its destiny in the 
ocean that washes the shores of Cathay, or, by 



m BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

the smallest different impulse, follow the Gulf 
Stream to where it sinks its identity in the North- 
ern Sea. 

A foot, one way or the other, in its fall or 
impulse, may separate it from its fellows by many 
thousands of miles. 

As originally established, the Yellowstone Park 
was 61 miles by 53 miles, an area of a little over 
3,000 square miles. By later enactments and 
proclamations it has been increased to 3,344 
square miles. 

The present administration of the Park is tem- 
porary. The breakdown of the political adminis- 
trations led finally to the appointment of an army 
officer as acting superintendent. This arrange- 
ment, however, seems likely to become permanent, 
except as to some details to which I shall refer 
later. 

As a whole, the Yellowstone presents itself as a 
vast plateau ranging from 6,500 to 8,000 feet 
above sea level. It is hemmed in on the east by 
the mighty barrier of the Absarokee Range that, 
further south, is denominated the Wind River 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 81 

Mountains. Through these there is but one out- 
let that is at all practicable — Sylvan Pass, 8,600 
feet in altitude. 

On the south, the Big Game Range presents 
another great mountain wall. On the northwest 
is the Gallatin Range, and, on the southwest, the 
Tetons repel the adventurous. 

These mighty barriers are among the reasons 
that so long deterred exploration and settlement 
of this wonderful region. 

It is a curious fact that this, the most wonderful, 
interesting and strange, part of the United States 
should have been the very last to be known, 
explored, delimited, and opened to the traveler. 
For this there were reasons other than its moun- 
tain isolation. Other regions more inaccessible 
than this, more forbidding, had been opened to 
settlement long before the Yellowstone was 
known, except by name. About it clustered myths. 
Vague rumors of its wonders percolated out to be 
laughed at and derided, but no one cared to 
verify or to disprove them until the Washburne- 
Doane expedition of 1870 finally settled the loca- 
tion, limits and wonders of the region. 



82 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

There were three principal reasons for this long 
isolation. The geological information was such 
that, whatever mineral deposits might lie below 
its surface, they had doubtless been rendered 
inaccessible by vast deposits of lava from the 
latest volcanic centers known on the continent. 

As a hunting and trapping ground it was 
unavailable, because of its terrible winters, deep 
snows, and general inaccessibility at the time 
when trappers reap their harvest. 

And then, above all, it lay between, and apart 
from, the great channels of communication between 
the east and the west. It was an inland Saragasso 
Sea, about which flowed the early channels of com- 
merce and communication without ever crossing it. 
On the northwest, one great trail led up the Missouri 
and down the Columbia — the route of Lewis and 
Clarke. On the south, through the North Platte 
and across the divide, where is now Ogden, went 
another great road. But no trail crossed the 
Yellowstone. Occasionally, a wandering trapper 
touched its rim, saw nothing to tempt, and left 
it unexplored. 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 83 

So outside the great thoroughfares of that early 
day, with neither mineral nor pelts to tempt the 
early explorers, it remained a terra incognita until 
the year of our Lord, 1870. 

The first mention of the ''Yellowstone" is in 
1798, in the manuscript of David Thompson, the 
explorer, who was long connected with the British 
fur trade in the northwest. He derived it from 
the Mandan Indians, cognate to the Sioux, who 
called it Mi-tsi-a-da-zi, ''Rock Yellow River." 
Among the early voyagers it became Roche 
Jaune, Yellow Rock, and hence Yellowstone. 

The first white man who ever saw the Yellow- 
stone was David Coulter, a Missourian, who accom- 
panied the expedition of Lewis and Clarke. When 
they reached Fort Mandan on their return, Coulter 
secured permission to leave the party and start 
on a trapping expedition. After two years' 
absence. from civilization, he was still enamored 
of the wilderness and returned to it rather than 
to the "settlements." 

He remained in the region of the forks of the 
Missouri until 1807. Starting homeward with his 



84 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

spoil he met, at the mouth of the Platte, one, Manuel 
Lisa, who had started to establish a fort and 
trading post somewhere on the headwaters of the 
Missouri. 

Two things happened that influenced widely 
the American conquest of this region. Captain 
Lewis had been compelled to kill a thieving 
Blackfeet and Coulter, as a messenger of Lisa to 
the Crows, was involved on their behalf in a 
battle with the Blackfeet. From that on, the 
Blackfeet, a tribe of the Algonquin nation, were 
implacably hostile to the whites, and did much to 
hold back the exploration and development of 
the country; while the Crows, on the other hand, 
were almost uniformly friendly. 

Coulter, returning from his expedition to the 
Crows, descended by the pass through the three 
Tetons and crossed the Yellowstone Park some- 
where near the Lower Basin. A tar spring is still 
known as Coulter's Hell, from his description. He 
saw a few of the geysers and is, undoubtedly, the 
first white man who ever had a glimpse of any of 
these wonders. 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 85 

His return adventures included an encounter 
with the Blackfeet Indians in which he was strip- 
ped, made to run a race with their fleetest warriors, 
escaped and made his way, naked and unarmed, 
for three hundred miles, to the post at Three 
Forks. 

Bradbury, the English traveler, saw him at 
St. Louis in 1810, and published an account of his 
wanderings. 

At that time there were three great tribes of 
Indians who surrounded the Park and held all 
the ways, north and south, east and west: the 
Blackfeet of the Algonquins, the Crows of the 
Sioux, and the Bannocks and Eastern Sho- 
shones of the Shoshone family. None of these 
lived in the Park or seemed to have visited it, 
except along the northern portion through which 
ran a faint trail evidently seldom traveled. 

The only Indians who occupied the Park were 
the Sheep Eaters, a branch of the Shoshones^ 
without horses or weapons, who lived, precariously, 
in huts of brush, by snaring animals. These In- 
dians were feeble, poor and degenerate. Among 



86 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

them was a tradition of volcanic eruptions, of 
great fires and convulsions of nature. More or 
less, the other Indians were superstitious about 
the Park. Without exact knowledge as to its 
wonders, the Great Spirit had there made him- 
self manifest. He was still at work and they 
avoided it. Even the Sheep Eaters inhabited 
only the northern portion and knew nothing, 
except by tradition, of the Geyser Basins. 

For long the Hudson Bay Fur Company held 
this territory with its patriarchal sway until 
John Jacob Astor and the American Fur Company, 
following the Lewis and Clarke expedition, dis- 
puted their title. The Astor Company abandoned 
the field, but the Northwest Fur Company, of 
Montreal, lawed the old company almost to its 
ruin, until a compromise was effected, in 1821, 
and the Hudson Bay Company held the field. 

In 1834, Astor sold his interests to Platte, 
Choteau & Company of St. Louis, out of which 
Choteau laid the foundation of his great fortune. 

About the same time the Rocky Mountain Fur 
Company was established, at whose head were 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 87 

General Ashley, of St. Louis, and William 
Sublette, one of the great figures of the time. 
Their head man was James Bridger, who almost 
deserves a chapter by himself. I do not intend 
to write a history of the American fur trade — ■ 
others have done it better than I could — but 
James Bridger is really the first white man who 
discovered and explored the Yellowstone Park. 

Bridger was long known as the monumental liar 
of the American West. At his death a friend 
proposed as his epitaph: '^Here 'Lies' James 
Bridger." And yet most of Bridger 's lies turned 
out to be true or, at least, to have foundation in 
fact. Before him Father De Smet, Warren Angus 
of the American Fur Company, and others, had 
touched the rim of the Park; but James Bridger 
is the real discoverer of its wonders. 

Born in 1804, he was a celebrated character in 
the Northwest before he was twenty, and his life 
practically bridged the whole period till civiliza- 
tion came; and after countless adventures, life 
among wild men and wild things, he died peace- 
fully in his bed, in Missouri, in 188L 



88 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

It was said of him that he could, with a piece of 
charcoal, draw on the skin side of a buffalo robe, a 
complete map of the Rocky Mountains, with 
every stream and watershed and pass. He had a 
natural instinct for direction. He guided Sydney 
Johnston's army in the campaign against the 
Mormons. His trading post on the Platte was, for 
thirty years, the outpost of ci\dlization, and his 
stories were the delight, envy and awe of all new- 
comers. 

For instance, one of his favorite stories of the 
Park was the time that he sighted an elk and fired 
at him. To his surprise, nothing happened. He 
neither killed nor even frightened the elk. Creep- 
ing close he fired again. Still nothing happened. 
Time after time, still creeping closer, he fired 
his trusty '^Old Betsy" without effect. Finally 
he discovered that between him and the elk was a 
cliff of glass, through which he could not only see 
the elk three miles away, but which, by its lens-like 
character, made the game appear within easy rifle 
shot. As a matter of fact, there is a glass cliff 
(obsidian — volcanic glass) in the Park, but it is far 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 89 

from transparent. Old Jim knew the glass cliff, 
and drew on his imagination for the rest. 

Once he found a stream that flowed so swiftly 
over the rocks that the friction made the water hot. 
Again there was a modicum of truth. In one of 
the cold water streams, in its very center, is a hot 
spring that boils up from the rock bottom, and 
from it Bridger derived his fable of water boiled 
by its own friction. 

One day he crossed a stream in the Park, and a 
little later discovered that his horse's feet were 
shrinking to mere pegs. It was a river of alum 
that had shrunk his horse's hoofs by contact. 
Nor was this all. Such was the effect of the alum 
river that his return trip was less than a quarter of 
his going journey. Here is the puckering power 
of alum reduced to the 'nth degree. 

Among his fables was one of a "petrified forest," 
where everything — grass, trees, birds and animals 
— had turned to stone. Again there was a founda- 
tion of truth in it, for there is a real petrified forest, 
in the northeastern part of the Park, full of petri- 
fied wonders. 



90 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Bridger's lies were so notorious, and his stories 
so improbable, that no one believed them and his 
tales passed, without notice or examination, as 
^'Old Jim Bridger's Hes," till 1859, when Captain 
Reynolds was directed to proceed to British 
America to observe the eclipse of that year and, 
incidentally, to explore the Yellowstone. It was 
early in the season, and his attempt to find a pass 
through the Tetons was a failure. After floun- 
dering through snowdrifts without progress, until 
the time of the eclipse drew near, he abandoned 
the attempt and that ended his expedition. 

In 1869, the Government once more sent out an 
expedition, the Folsom party, that was a partial 
success. They discovered the Lower Geyser 
Basin, but were compelled by a shortage of provi- 
sions to retreat. 

But, in the meanwhile; these different reports, 
fables and exaggerations had aroused interest, 
and, in 1870, General Washburne, who was then 
Surveyor-General of Montana, organized the 
expedition that first really ''discovered" the Yel- 
lowstone and its wonders. With him were 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 91 

Nathaniel P. Langford, who became the first super- 
intendent of the Park, who was long known as 
^^National Park" Langford, and to whom, perhaps, 
more than to any other person, is due the existence 
and present purposes of the Park; Cornelius Hedges 
of Montana, who first proposed the idea of National 
Park; Truman C. Evarts of Montana, whose sepa- 
ration from the party, wanderings and sufferings 
would make a chapter alone; Samuel T. Hauser, 
who later became Governor of Montana, Walter 
Trumbull, a son of Senator Trumbull of Illinois; 
Benjamin Stickney; Warner C. Gillette, and 
Jacob Smith. 

These were the civilian members of the party, 
and, as a guard and escort, General Sheridan 
detached Lieutenant Doane, and ^^one sergeant 
and four privates." 

This party entered the Park by way of the Gal- 
latin River, on the north, explored the Yellow- 
stone, discovered its marvelous falls, found Yel- 
lowstone Lake, named Mt. Washburne and made 
a thorough exploration of the different geyser 
basins. 



92 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

It was the first scientific, authentic delimitation 
and description of all these wonders. Just before 
leaving the Park, while encamped at the junction 
of the Gibbon and Firehole rivers, Cornelius 
Hedges suggested the idea that this wonder 
region should be set aside as a national park and 
pleasure ground. The idea was adopted and from 
that night dates the fact that you and I may see 
these wonders without charge. From that hour, 
the night of September 19, 1870, which deserves 
a date by itself, began the idea of a national 
park. General Washburne died a year later, as a 
result of the exposure and privations endured on 
the trip. But Langford and Hedges, enlisting 
others with them, carried through Congress an 
Act constituting the Park, '^dedicated and set 
apart as a public park and pleasure ground for the 
benefit and enjoyment of the people." 

Langford was made the first superintendent, 
without any salary, and so served for five years. 
He deserves the title of ''Father of the Park." To 
him, more than to anyone else, we owe the 
motive, inspiration, and practical result of it. 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 93 

Naturally, speculators soon saw the possi- 
bilities of profit in it, as they had seen it earlier 
at Niagara. But for Langford they might have 
succeeded. Congress made no appropriations. 
But Langford and his allies, among whom was the 
late Senator Vest of Missouri, fought the grafters 
in and out of office, until, finally, the public awoke 
to the value of this great heritage of theirs, to the 
work that these unselfish men were doing for them 
without price; and, at last, the Park was estab- 
lished on a fair basis. Rules were made for its 
government, for the protection of its animal life, 
for its policing and the preservation to the public 
of its beauties. Like too many things that oar 
Government does, it is only half-done. The 
scheme is wrong, but, at least, the Park is there 
free — open to you and to me and to our children. 
It has been saved from exploitation by grafters 
and parasites, and, sooner or later, it will be gov- 
erned properly. The oftener you and I go there, 
and the more we talk about it, the nearer that 
desirable day will be. 



94 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

I suppose that, in this connection, I should say 
something geological, something about the climate. 
Well, the less said about the climate the better. 
It has no summer; "nine months winter, and three 
months late in the fall:" that is its climate. 
Sometimes it snows in June. Mostly there is a 
frost every month. It is not what you would call 
a good farming country. In fact, Nature, when 
she fixed it, seemed determined that it should be 
nothing but a summer resort, and have no attrac- 
tions for any one but tourists and tourines. In 
short, that there should be no possible incentive 
to money-making anywhere within its limits. 

You cannot even raise an onion in the Park. 
For agriculture, it is as valuable as the north side 
of a tombstone — just about. 

Geologically, it is enough to set a scientific 
sharp crazy. 

It is the last effort of Nature. The last expres- 
sion of the forces that have molded, shaved, 
planed and dressed the planet to what it is. 
First, there was a great geological upheaval, just 
such as you can find anywhere in the Rockies. 



HISTORICAL AND OTHERWISE 95 

Rock uptilted and stratified — Miocene, Pliocene, 
and all the other 'cenes — Devonian, Red Silurian, 
and all the rest. Then came along the glacial 
period and planed and trimmed things. And, last 
of all, the internal fires began to get busy. Out 
of a thousand vents they vomited forth lava — the 
rhyolite formation that, today, distinguishes the 
whole region. And these vast flows filled the val- 
leys, leveled the hills, and gave us those long, 
suave slopes, those soft contours, those gracious 
undulations, that so surprise you as you travel 
over the Park. 

''And so the old dim years of long ago 
Went by with fire and ice and fire and snow." 

And so, today, as you wander through the Park, 
you are surprised by fields that look like the 
Mohawk Valley in New York, hke the lower slopes 
of the Blue Ridge in Pennsylvania, and in 
Tennessee.. At every turn you look to see a log 
farmhouse or a ''Cuppin." 

Nature has not yet spent herself. She still 
reserves her marvels for daily view. You may 
see there a world in the making. New volcanoes 



96 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

bursting forth, old ones dying or extinct, and new 
formations still building. It is a half-finished 
house. All about, you may hear the Master 
Builder at work, with n^ighty heavings and pulsa- 
tions and hammerings. All about, you may see his 
latest handiwork, his experiments, failures and 
successes. 

And now, gentle reader, if you have come so far 
with me, after all these detours and meanderings, 
with your permission, we will enter the Park. 
Yes, we are there at the Gateway. 



IN THE PARK 



97 



^Ijaptev 5* 




THE PARL.K 




AVE you ever seen a real stage 
coach? Have you ever seen it, 
with its four horses, harness rat- 
tUng, the whip cracking, circle up 
to the hotel and come to a stop 
at the exact inch — the driver 

with his slouch hat inclined rakishly, foot on the 

brake, and the general air of "Watch me and see 

how easy it is!" 

And then the bustle of preparation, the stowing 

of the baggage, the squabbling as to who shall sit 

beside the driver: all so very different from a 

humdrum railroad trip. 

You are back in the forties and you look for 

peg-top trousers and bell-crowned hats. Modern 

dress seems incongruous. 



98 . BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

So that morning, when we aw^oke at Yellow- 
stone, in that sparkling atmosphere, and saw the 
big red coaches come dashing up, the four horses 
wheeling with mathematical precision to the plat- 
form, we felt a glow, a thrill of anticipation, that 
no mere railroad trip could possibly give. 

You are allowed but twenty- five pounds of 
baggage, and it is a question of sorting and 
leaving. .For myself, I elected to travel in a 
riding suit of heavy cords, none too heavy in that 
climate. Up there in the Park people are still 
talking about my trousers. They were made by 
a high-class tailor, the first he ever made, and I 
think he got the pattern out of The Ladies^ Hovie 
Journal. Never has there been such a sartorial 
creation. The rear and front elevations are 
precisely alike, so that, at a distance, it is impos- 
sible to tell whether I am coming or going. 

My party, besides myself, consisted of The Lady, 
the Little Lady, the Banker and Chuck and Spot. 
These last-named are not, as you might think, two 
setter pups, but a couple of college boys with all 
the peculiarities, implications and trimmings that 
go with the college boy. And speaking of clothes, 



IN THE PARK 99 

by what mysterious consensus has the college boy 
arrived at his uniform universal, unvaried by 
parallels or meridians, the same from California to 
Maine? You know it. Item, one hat fantasti- 
cally raked, with a rah-rah band. Item, one 
preposterous shirt and one noisy tie. Item, one 
coat padded at the shoulders, slashed at the 
sleeves, and much slanted as to pockets. Item, 
one pair of trousers, rolled at the bottom and 
flared at the hips, supported at the waist by a 
belt drawn to the last notch so as to give that 
broken appearance about the waist line, as though 
he were some new species of hymenoptera. No 
self-respecting boy would wear galluses; it would 
be a disgrace to admit that he couldn't keep his 
trousers up with a belt. Well, we had two of 
them, and their adventures on the trip, mostly of 
an amatory nature, would fill a book. 

There are several ways of doing the Park. You 
may take a seat in one of the big comfortable 
stages that make the round trip in five days. 
You may do as we did : take your own surrey and 
driver and jog along easily, stopping where you 



100 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

will. That is the best way — the way I should 
recommend to a party — or, if you are fond of 
out-door life, Mr. Haynes will furnish horses, 
pack muleS; tent and a guide, and you may leave 
the beaten highways, camp in the open, catch 
your own fish and cook them, and get back to 
the ground. 

Our first driver was a boy of fifteen, at least he 
said that was his age, but no boy of that age 
could have acquired such a mass of misinformation. 
I never saw a grown man who knew so much that 
wasn't so. He had also discovered that the 
world was hollow, a mere fleeting show. I think 
he was troubled some about his immortal soul. 
He condemned all secular music. Jokes, laughter 
and mirth distressed him. I sat with him for six 
hours, and, at the end of that time, my joyous 
disposition was gone. The fountains of mirth 
dried up. That boy had the most blighting, 
withering effect of any creature I have ever 
known. In addition to that, all he knew about 
the Park was wrong. He located Junction Butte 
on the Firehole River, just eighty miles out of its 



IN THE PARK 101 

place. He miscalled every stream and waterfall. 
And he was just as sure about his misstatements 
as an almanac, as positive as a patent medicine ad. 

At the end of the first day, I called up Mr. 
Haynes and sobbingly asked for relief and got it. 
Dudgeon was detailed as our guide, philosopher 
and friend, and he filled the bill. He shall have 
a chapter all to himself, whether my publishers 
like it or not. 

Well, at last, trunks had been ransacked, bags 
packed and unpacked and repacked, and we were 
off. The Cave of Gloom and I on the front seat; 
the Lady and the Banker next, and the Little 
Lady and Chuck and Spot together in the rear. 
This was fortunate, as some of the college stories 
they told the Little Lady would have horribly 
shocked the Worm; in fact, he warned them 
solemnly, in the middle of- a college song, that the 
guards would arrest them if they sang any more 
such. 

But not even the Blighted Being could wholly 
squelch us. We were too happy. The road at 
first lies through Christmas Tree Park, a great 



102 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

wilderness of the lodge-pole pine, each about the 
right Christmas tree size for a medium family. 
No wonder Mr. Pinchot says we need not worry 
about Christmas trees. There are enough here 
to keep us running for several hundred years, and 
that is all they are good for. 

Within a mile or two we strike the Madison 
River, and here your surprises begin. I had 
expected mountains, cliffs, precipitous gorges, and 
awe-inspiring canons from the outset. Not so. 
The road winds in and out by a tranquil stream 
that might be born in any eastern state. There 
are no mountains in sight — just big brotherly hills 
that make you feel comfortable and neighborly; 
hills that alternate the sombre green of the pine 
and the lively emerald of long grassy slopes. 
Once there was a waterfall, a most conventional^ 
ladylike waterfall, nothing rude or boisterous 
about it. It dances and splutters and sparkles 
down some stagey rocks, in the most theatrical 
way, with the most self-conscious air. I more 
than suspect that an army engineer built that 
waterfall. It is as nice and precise as any West 
Pointer. 



IN THE PARK 103 

At first you do not see much of the wild hfe of 
the Park, An occasional chipmunk or a squirrel 
pursues his affairs with that air of intense business 
that all small people affect. But, at the first, you 
are mainly concerned about the geysers. 

That road, however, makes you forget every- 
thing. It is a French road, broad, well made, 
winding by grades almost imperceptible, here losing 
the river over a ridge, there descending to its very 
level so that you see the trout playing in the 
shallows and the long tranquil reaches where it 
lingers to rest in the shade of aspen and willow. 

One historical spot we passed — National Peak 
— where, as I have said before, the idea of this 
National Park was first conceived. 

The Encyclopoedia of Misstatements named it 
Junction Butte and told a long-winded story 
about a man who climbed up and couldn't climb 
down, a -story that belongs fifty miles away, and 
the peak that he named belongs as far in another 
direction. But there we saw our first trout. 
Trout? Nay — a whale. Did you ever see a Loch 
Leven trout? It is the most beautiful fish that 



104 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

swims. This one measured twenty-three inches in 
length. I dechne to give his weight; you would 
not believe me. He was caught by a camping 
party on the Firehole, and they came out and 
showed him and bragged over him and asked us 
to dinner. That is one beauty of the Park; 
ceremony, class distinctions, social position, 
clothes, pocket books and bank accounts are all 
forgotten up there. We are just a bunch of kids 
out for a good time. 

I believe if I had stopped there I could have 
caught a fish. I never did but once, and I have 
fished in many lands. This particular fish that 
I caught got away, but I should know him any- 
where. He looked to me bigger than Jonah's 
whale, and he had a moist eye and a frightened 
expression. Something about my appearance 
displeased him and he removed the hook and 
went away. Some day I shall meet that fish 
again — I know it. 

Once I went fishing in Lake Killarney. You 
pay for the privilege, and there is a tradition that 
Brian Boru, or McCarty More, or some one else 



IN THE PARK 105 

caught a salmon there, about 150, B. C. People 
have been fishing there ever since on the strength 
of that tradition. I finally asked my boatman 
if there were really any fish in the lake. "Sure, 
yer honor, lashins of thim." "Well, what kind?" 
"Oh, all kinds." "Any trout?" "Sure, fine big 
trouts." "Croppy?" "Sure, yer honor." *'Bass?" 
"Sure, basses that long." "Any thermometers?" 
"Sure, yer honor, but" (confidentially so as not 
to excite my hopes) ''this is not the saison fer 
thim; if you wor here in March now you'd see 
thim lapin all over the lake." I gave it up then. 
I concluded to wait till March. 

Shortly before we reached the Fountain Hotel, 
we crossed Nez Perces Creek which recalls one of 
the most romantic and pathetic of our Indian 
wars — that with Chief Joseph. 

In 1877, General Sherman, with a small party, 
passed through the Park, leaving it but a day or 
two before the Nez Perces entered it. The Nez 
Perces are acknowledged to be the finest tribe of 
red men on the continent. Early converted to 
Christianity, they were always at peace with us. 



106 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

and it was their boast that they had never slain 
a white man. An absolute breach of faith upon 
our part, the infraction of a solemn treaty, drove 
them to war. The campaign that followed was 
extraordinary. They were followed for 1,500 
miles. Fifteen severe engagements were fought, 
in which we lost nearly 500 killed and wounded, 
and the Indians an equal number, before they 
finally surrendered. In their wanderings they 
crossed the Park twice. But, in all that time, no 
depredations were committed, nor non-com- 
batants killed by authority of the chiefs. Joseph 
even bought supplies from the whites and paid for 
them when he might have taken them. Two small 
bands of marauders that left the main body killed 
two tourists and committed some other depre- 
dations. 

At last, surrounded and defeated, they sur- 
rendered, but not until they had shown the most 
heroic courage and fighting qualities of the highest 
type. . 

I suppose the extinction of the red man is inevit- 
able, but the fate of the Nez Perces, brave, chival- 
rous and doomed to destruction, excites my pity. 



IN THE PARK 107 

At last we top a little hill, and far off is a spurt 
of vapor, a jet of steam. ^^Geezers," says Long- 
bow. Naturally, I did not believe him, but for 
once, the only time, he was right. On rising 
ground, fronting the Fountain Geyser, is the 
Fountain Hotel. We were in time for lunch. We 
might have seen the sights, pushed on, and been 
at Old Faithful that night, but our truthful 
James stretched the distance, which is eleven 
miles, to nineteen; so we spent the night at the 
Fountain. 

I am glad we did. Up on the hill near the geyser 
is a hot spring that, piped to the hotel bath-rooms, 
affords the most delightful bath I have ever taken. 
I do not know why, but there is some subtle 
quality in the water that leaves the skin like a 
baby's — some of nature's alchemy, one of her 
mysterious compounds that the chemists cannot 
duplicate nor even imitate. 

And here we saw our first geyser. The Foun- 
tain is five minutes' walk from the hotel, and is 
liable to turn loose almost any time. Near it are 
the famous Paint Pots. Fancy a basin, perhaps 



108 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

a hundred feet across^ filled with a viscous sticky- 
looking paste, that plop-plops exploding bubbles 
of mud here and there, shifting its colors through 
all the tints of the kalsominer's material. In 
fact, it is a kind of kalsomine and has been used 
for wall decorations with success. Not far from 
it is the Clepsydra, a warm spring that boils at 
intervals of ten minutes, then subsides to mere 
warmness. Now tell me, if you can, why that 
spring just boils once in ten minutes and then 
subsides? I studied it a long time; I have read 
everything I can find on it. There is some 
unsatisfactory solution for the big geysers that 
go fighting their way a hundred feet in the air. 
But why should this tiny spring, never boiling 
over, always within the limits of its little pool, 
all gleaming with turquoise and sapphire, just 
once in so often boil, then quit boiling? 

At the Fountain we found the first of the Park 
hotels, and one of the best, where all are good. 
At the Fountain we met Mr. and Mrs. G., of New 
York. You know how it is; traveling a beaten 
route you meet the same people over and over 



1 10 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

again till finally you begin to smile at each other 
and speak, and then you find that they know the 
A's, who are particular friends of yours, and then 
you have something in a glass with ice in it and 
you are blood brothers. 

That was the way with Mr. G. ; we kept meeting 
him until we just had to speak, and quite a large 
chunk of our pleasure was their very delightful 
companionship. Mr. G. was a college boy once 
himself (stroke oar in one of the great boat races 
and still has the biceps), but I fancy that about 
all the exercise he has taken for some years is 
signing checks. 

And here we saw our first bears. All the Park 
hotels have a garbage pile, where the refuse from 
the kitchen is dumped once a day, and here the 
bears come from the woods for meals "s^ la cart." 
The garbage place at the Fountain is some distance 
from the hotel, and that summer a particularly 
ugly old she-grizzly and two cubs had taken pos- 
session of it, and it was considered unsafe to go 
near them. Two of the soldier guards stand 
there with their rifles and heavy service revolvers 



IN THE PARK 1 1 1 

to keep us from approaching too closely and to 
guard against the bears. This reassures us. We 
know they are wild bears; that there is no hippo- 
drome about it. Your first sight of a real wild 
bear there in his native woods gives you just a 
little thrill. It is not like a caged or menagerie 
bear. You realize that there are possibilities of 
danger and when, just at dusk, they came gallop- 
ing down the hill — three of them, a mother and 
two half-grown cubs — it was an event. 

The mother was very suspicious and, when she 
stood up to sniff for danger, she looked as big as 
the side of a house. • 

Our route the next morning to Old Faithful and 
the Upper Basin lay by what is known as the 
Middle Basin. 

The fountain and the great fountain geysers 
give but little idea of the forces of nature that are 
at work. . As you approach the Middle Basin, 
playfully known as Hell's Half- Acre, you begin to 
appreciate just what is doing here. You pass 
forests denuded of foliage by explosions from the 
mud volcanoes and geysers. Whole tracts of pas- 



112 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 




ture land seared and burned by noxious gases and 
poisonous waters. As you cross the Firehole, you 

reach the 
greatest gey- 
ser in the 
world, the 
Excelsior . 
One eruption 
of this gey- 
ser, in 1888, 

■■■^ level of the 

HHP" Firehole 

River, a con- 

si der a ble 

stream, six 

inches. It 

has been in- 

active since; 

but its great 

EXCELSIOR GEYSER basin, three 

hundred feet across, boils and grumbles and 

threatens. No one knows when it will break forth 




IN THE PARK 113 

again. It has been there for ages, but only one 
authentic eruption has been recorded. There are 
Prismatic Lake, and smaller springs and geysers 
innumerable. In fact, in the Lower and Middle 
Basins, there are twenty geysers and more than 
a thousand hot springs. 

Everywhere the world is still a-making, and, 
as you walk across the ^'formation," as the depos- 
its are called, and feel the ground tremble under 
you and vague groanings and threatenings from 
beneath, with spoutings and hissings and roarings 
on every side, you are entirely willing to have lived 
after the process of earth building was pretty well 
clone. 



OLD FAITHFUL 



115 



Qlijapiev O. 





OLD FAITHFUL 



HAVE purposely forborne to say 
much about geysers until we had 
made our bow to Old Faithful, 
the finest of them all. I saw 
it first in company with a fat 
man from Tennessee. The fat 
man had lunched at the Fountain without seeing 
its geysers. He did not believe in them. He 
was not afraid of them. He was not only con- 
temptuous, but even disrespectful. He had seen 
the President in eruption. Heard him talk to a 
Tennessee congressman who wanted an undesir- 
able citizen appointed to a federal office, and no 
''geezer" could scare him. No, sir; he wouldn't 
be afraid to go right up and shake hands with 'em. 



1 16 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

So we went, in due season, to see Old Faithful. 
The fat man stood on the very brink of the 
unfathomable chasm from which the fountain 
springs. Railed at it and made fun of it. By and 
by, it gave a sigh, spluttered up eight or ten feet 
and subsided. ''There," said the fat man, '^what 
did I tell you? Nothing to be afraid of; just a 
little tea kittle business." Just then Old Faithful 
started. Up and up the gigantic jet of water 
went, as though it would never stop. The fat man 
called on his Maker, fervently, and sat down in a 
puddle of warm water that Old Faithful had pro- 
vided for that purpose. Then he left the forma- 
tion, the little hill that the geyser has made for 
itself in its thousands of years' flow. Left the for- 
mation, did I say? Well, I despair of conveying an 
idea of his speed. The winner of the Marathon 
race was a caterpillar in molasses compared to 
that gait. I saw him some hours afterward, but 
he had not yet recovered, and spoke of ''them 
damn geezers" in an awestruck voice. 

There are geysers and geysers, but Old Faithful 
holds the palm. Its waters hold in solution, and 



OLD FAITHFUL 117 

deposit about its crater, a silicious formation of 
very slow growth. As the water flows, a trifle of 
this silicate is left each time. By calculating the 
growth, within known times, we arrive at the con- 
clusion that this particular geyser has been burst- 
ing forth, at the same interval of sixty-five min- 
utes, for something like a million years. Think 
of that! Never failing, always on time, so that 
you may set your watch by it. Through all that 
incalculable, inconceivable period, it has thus 
thrust itself up and fallen back. Now, why, why, 
does it do it just once in so often? All about it 
are other geysers, some larger, some smaller, but 
all more or less irregular save one. Old Faithful, 
therefore, sets itself apart — distinguishes itself — 
from all others. 

Hour after hour, and time after time, you go to 
see it without wearying. It is a new miracle each 
time — stupendous, awesome. 

You stand above the cleft from which it 
emerges and hear, far down, tiny whisperings, little 
sighs as though some animal turned in its sleep. 
Then a boiling caldron forces itself almost to the 



1 18 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

lip of the pool. It looks threatening and you 
retreat. But an invincible fascination draws you 
back. The crepitation increases. The boiling 
waters surge higher and higher, till there is an 
outpouring perhaps ten feet in height. Then you 
fall back, for this is the preliminary warning. You 
wait and wait, and then, suddenly — without warn- 
ing or premonitory sound — a vast jet of hot water 
and steam and spray soars upward. Up and up 
and up, until it seems as though it would never 
stop. The sun strikes its edges into prismatic 
brilliance. A drapery of mist enfolds it and one 
wide pennant of steam and foam floats away to 
the leeward. It is solid, yet intangible. Palpa- 
ble, evanescent, fugacious, and when at night they 
turn the great searchlight on it, and it sparkles 
and glows with an inward fire, and melts and dis- 
solves and re-forms, you feel so inadequate, so 
petty, your little store of language so futile to 
describe it. 

And then you think how long it has performed 
that hourly miracle when no eye saw it ; you imagine 
the thousands and thousands of years during which 



OLD FAITHFUL 119 

that superb spectacle has wasted itself on an 
empty land, and you are solemnly glad that you 
have seen it. 

And now a word as to the "why." Geysers have 
been the subject of much scientific investigation, 
intensely interesting as they are, and the scientific 
world has generally come to accept the Bunsen 
theory, that more or less accounts for both the 
boiling springs and the eruptive springs, or geysers. 
These springs are long tubes, large or small, 
filled with water, resting at the bottom, at some 
unknown depths, on the internal fires of the earth. 
If the tube be large enough and communication 
with the surface free, the steam forces its way out 
gradually, condensing in the water and raising 
that to the boiling point. These hot springs boil 
and bubble continually, but, because of the free 
escape of the steam and its regular condensation, 
do not, as a rule, overflow their basins. 

And if the geyser tubes are smaellr, circulation 
is impeded. As the steam forces its way upward^ 
the condensation ceases. The outlet for the 
steam is closed; the pressure, already great 



OLD FAITHFUL 121 

at that depth, is increased enormously, until at 
last the steam simply explodes, as it would in a 
boiler, forcing out before it the contents of the 
tube until such time as the pressure is relieved, 
and the process renews itself. The greater the 
heat below, and the smaller the tube, the greater 
the force with which it is expelled. Thus the 
Giant Geyser rises to a height of two hundred and 
fifty feet; the Giantess to two hundred, while Old 
Faithful varies from one hundred and sixty to one 
hundred and seventy-five feet. 

Once a Chinese washerman in the Park had a 
brilliant thought. He would build his laundry 
over one of those warm springs. Fuel would cost 
nothing. So thought — so done. The first wash- 
ing, well soaped, went in. In about five minutes 
the spring became a geyser, blew the building, 
washing and Chinaman a hundred yards, and then 
cheerfully resumed its ordinary boiling and 
bubbling. The explanation was that the soap 
created a viscous surface on the water, prevented 
the escape of steam from below and turned the 
spring into a geyser. Any interruption of the 



122 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

escape of the steam will turn a mere boiling spring 
into a geyser. Even stirring the top of some of 
them with a stick will make them erupt. So j^ou 
are solemnly cautioned not to tease or annoy the 
geysers. You can't tell what may result. 

Bunsen's theory is all right, as far as it goes. He 
found it in Iceland, but I confess that it does not 
explain the Yellowstone. It does not tell us why 
one geyser should go off once a minute, another 
once in sixty-five minutes, while others go off 
when they get good and ready. The Excelsior, 
that broke all records, has been quiescent since 
1888. The Giantess varies in her intervals from 
three days to a week. 

All of this is in the Upper Basin, and really the 
geysers are not the sum of it. Scattered every- 
where are innumerable (literally so) boiling springs, 
warm springs and geysers of every kind. There 
are twenty-six geysers in sight from the inn and, 
within easy walking distance, four hundred hot 
springs. Some of these are alone worth the price 
of admission — the Sapphire, the Emerald, the 
Morning Glory and a dozen others. I wish that 



OLD FAITHFUL 123 

I could give just a faint picture of the Morning 
Glory Spring. Imagine a perfect morning glory, 
just opened before the sun has struck it, still wet 
with dew; imagine it magnified a thousand times 
and then imagine a crystalline spring, boiling up 
from its very heart, decorating the iridescent 
walls of its chambered refuge with innumerable 
diamonds, sparkling, flowing, retreating, changing 
every instant, a spring down whose opaline depths 
you can look and look and never see the bottom; 
fancy diamonds, turquoises, sapphires and emer- 
alds in a setting of the purest crystal, so that every 
facet is replicated a hundredfold, and you may 
then get some glimpse of that glorious fountain. 
There is nothing like it in the world. Science 
stands before it baffled. Art cannot reproduce 
it, nor language describe it. You hang above it 
dazzled, fascinated, hopeless of ever remembering 
it. In shape and color it is a true morning glory, 
but what flower ever had that vanishing, elusive 
recrudescence. What flower could ever glow and 
flame and fade and flame again as that spring does? 
One might imagine a geyser, some one might 



124 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

describe it, but, when you approach the Morning 
Glory Spring, language fades, the vocabulary halts, 
the palette is worthless. Go and see it. Don't 
ask me to describe it. 

The show place of the Park is Old Faithful Inn. 
By the way, do you know the difference between 
an inn and an hotel? Two dollars a day; and Old 
Faithful is worth it. If you have been in northern 
waters, you know those great, high-peaked log 
houses that decorate the Fjords of Norway. One 
of them has been transplanted to the Yellowstone, 
but magnified until you hardly know it. Fifteen 
thousand square miles of woodland have been 
searched to make a harmonious construction. It 
is a log house sublimated, raised to the 'nth 
degree. The lobby is sixty feet from floor to 
ceiling. The great chimney holds twelve fire- 
places. The great brass clock ticks off the hours 
with a pendulum twelve feet long. Gallery above 
gallery the floors rise, and, crowning all, is an obser- 
vatory from which the great search light illumi- 
nates Old Faithful and flashes the message of 
civilization to the wandering bears in the nearby 



OLD FAITHFUL 125 

woods. You sleep in a room with log walls, 
where the electric juice responds to your touch, 
hot water flows from the faucet, and a bebuttoned 
bell boy answers your call. 

You eat in a room that is the last expression of a 
"lodge in some vast wilderness," where the latest 
French cookery tempts your appetite, and a gray 
squirrel leaps on the table and steals the remnant 
of your muffin, as unafraid as a prepaid boarder. 

The stairways are puncheons, laid flat side up, 
and the banisters are crooked pine knees for 
which all the woods of the Park have been 
searched to make them exactly alike. 

Above the great lobby is a gallery, big enough 
for a state convention and floored for dancing. 
Here Chuck and Spot cut out two princesses, 
organized a dance, ran all the other boys into the 
woods, and held the field against all-comers. I 
have never learned the full history of that even- 
ing, but I imagine it would be worth writing up. 
About midnight Spot and his princess tired of the 
dance and retired from the world to the big front 
piazza. They took a seat just below his mother's 
window. I am ashamed to say it, but she listened. 

9 



126 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

But it was Greek to her. Modern slang, dashed 
with vaudeville wit, utterly unintelligible to her 
ears, as, in fact, is most of the private conversa- 
tion of Chuck and Spot. 

Recalling the stately and ceremonious wooing 
of her own girlhood, she was just a httle bit 
shocked. 

"Gee, kid, but I'm stuck on you. I could chin 
with you all night." 

He: "That's all right, honey. Close your face 
a minute, I want to smoke." 

He: "Honey, I should think you'd make your 
mother a lot of trouble." 

She: "I do, kid, but I'm on the square, if 
my mother is a washerwoman." 

This from a young lady whose papa owns 
most of his native town and has a mortgage on 
the rest. "0 Tempores! Mores!'' 

This new species of hymenoptera to which 
Chuck and Spot belong is just a little beyond us. 
The Lady can only sit and wonder. They speak 
a language of their own, a dialect foreign to my 



OLD FAITHFUL 127 

ancient ears, I confess it. I am a troglodyte. 
They belong to the age of aviators and wireless 
telegraphy. Just what our beloved tongue will 
be when they get through with it, I shudder to 
think. Already I find myself in a foreign land, 
and my mother tongue has been married so many 
times she has forgotten her first husband. 

Old Faithful has its complement of bears. 
Just a little way back of it you may see, at sunset, 
black and brown and grizzly he and she bears, 
cubs, and two-year-olds (I think we counted 
twenty-four that night); and, after the great 
search light was turned on, we went to the roof 
with the glass and watched the light flash upon 
them. Some of them paid no attention to it; 
just went on feeding. Some of the newcomers 
took fright and climbed trees. But most of them 
looked at it unconcernedly, faced it with their 
beady eyes glistening against its refulgence, 
dared it to come on, and resumed their eating. 

They know, the older ones, that nothing can 
hurt them there so long as they behave. 

Old Faithful is, of course, the most famous of 



128 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

all the geysers, and the inn the most celebrated 
of the Park hotels. Justly so, but something of 
this is due to their accessibility. You may leave 
Ogden at night, be in the Park the next morning, 
where a short day's drive sets you down at the 
inn. There, in one day, you can see the whole 
basin, for all these wonders are within easy walking 
distance from the hotel; see within that one day's 
time more marvels than any other region in the 
world holds in one place, return to the railroad in 
time for the night train, and be gone but three 
days. In short, you can break your Overland 
trip at Ogden, and in three easy days get a very 
fair idea of the Park, learn all about geysers, see 
the bears, and have enough to brag about for a 
year. I do not recommend this short trip, unless 
you are too busy to take a longer one; but it is one 
of the gratifying things about the Park, set apart 
as it is for the use and enjoyment of all the people, 
that it can be reached so easily, comfortably, and 
cheaply. In fact, there is no other trip, that I 
know of, that the people of this countr}^ can take 
and see so much for so little money and in so short 
a time. 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 



131 



^ijapUv 7> 





YELLOWSTONE LAKE 



T Old Faithful the child of woe left 
us, by request, and Mr. Haynes 
turned us over to Dudgeon, who, 
from there on, piloted us. I 
would not have you think T En- 
fant Terrible is a typical driver — 
far from it. He was an extra; an accident. I 
would like to think that we did something to 
lighten his burden. I did my best to lift the 
pall of gloom that he carried, and I do think at the 
last that he looked upon the world with a less 
jaundiced eye. I hope that, when these few lines 
meet his eye, he will be better; that my merry 
laughter and ingenuous mirth may have had some 
effect on him. 

Most of the drivers are veterans. They have 
driven stages from Old Mexico to the Saskatch- 



132 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

ewan. They are grizzled, weather beaten, full of 
quaint lies and mysterious quips and jests that 
none but they understand. Some of them, like 
Dudgeon, are college boys earning a few dollars 
in vacation, and looked upon with awe by their 
elders. I asked one of the old timers if it were not 
a fact that most of the drivers were college men. 
''Well," he said, ''I don't know much about this 
college business — never seen one in my life. You 
see I was raised down hyur at Jackson's Hole and 
they ain't much on college down there." He 
ruminated his tobacco, spat reflectively. ''I 
believe, though, I hearn tell that the feller that 
drives 66 graduated from the Keeley Institute, 
wherever that is. I reckon it's some kind of a 
college." 

The bubble reputation. Here is a reformed 
drunkard, looked up to as a superior being, because 
he graduated from an "institute." 

The morning we left Old Faithful it was rainy. 
One of those soggy, sodden, drippy days that 
should, by rights, have put us all to the bad. But 
it didn't. There was too much to talk about, too 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 133 

much to wonder over, too much to look forward 
to. After a mile or two the Lady lifted up her 
voice in song, and Dudgeon joined in with a 
mellow tenor that would have coaxed a bird out 
of his tree. He knew all the songs and could 
sing them. By and by, Chuck and Spot got to 
disputing about a collegiate football game. Dud- 
geon leaned back and corrected them. It turned 
out that he had played in sixteen inter-collegiate 
games, and, from that time on, he melted into our 
party as naturally as though he had grown up 
with us. 

I do not recall much of that road to the Thumb; 
it passed with jest and laughter and song. What 
mattered soggy ways and dripping skies, as we 
carried with us all that was necessary to human 
happiness. Neither the superb view of the 
Three Tetons, the beautiful sapphire gleam of 
Shoshone Lake, which you glimpse at one of the 
turns, nor the wonderful corkscrew hill, one of the 
roadmaking feats of the Park, could move us 
much to wonder or delay us long. I remember 
that, somewhere on the road, we crossed the 



134 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Continental Divide twice. We crossed Two 
Ocean Pond, an exquisite little mountain mirror 
broidered with superb Cape Cod pond lilies, 
whence the waters drain both ways, to the 
Atlantic and to the Pacific. Something I recall ot 
wayside jest and laughter, of college stories that 
made the Little Lady shriek with mirth; of old 
songs resung and of nfew stories retold — things 
that made Dull Care go hide himself, and poor, old, 
crippled, age- worn life go jigging down the muddy 
highway to long forgotten tunes. At last, and 
all too soon, we turned the hill and saw, far below 
us, Yellowstone Lake — a peculiar, mysterious, 
body of water lying far up among giant moun- 
tains, 7741 feet above sea level. It is the largest 
body of water in the world at that altitude, or, if 
you prefer it the other way, it is the highest lake 
of its size. Only Lake Titicaca and Lake Tahoe 
are higher, I believe. 

It has a shore line of a hundred miles and an 
area of 139 square miles. Its waters are fed 
mainly from the melting snows of the Absaroka 
Range and various thermal springs that are 



136 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

scattered all about its watershed. One of these, 
just at the Thumb, was the origin of one of Jim 
Bridger's celebrated lies. He swore that he had 
caught a trout in the cold water at the bottom of 
the lake, and, drawing it up through a hot current, 
brought it to the surface cooked and ready to eat. 

As a matter of fact, there is, on the very shore 
of the lake, a hot spring, and it is not uncommon 
to stand upon its ^'formation," and, after catching 
a trout from the lake, drop it into this spring and 
boil it on the hook. 

For, be it known, this is the fishing place 
par excellence of the Park. The Government has 
stocked the lake and its tributary streams with 
different varieties of trout. In fact, it is said that 
the lake is so overstocked that the fish are becom- 
ing subject to a parasite due to underfeeding, or 
to overstocking. Will you not, please, do some- 
thing to relieve this piscatory congestion by just 
going there to catch a few of them? As for 
myself, I hold the diamond-studded belt. I am 
the world's ''champeen." I am the only man 
that ever cast a line into that lake without catch- 
ing anything. 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 137 

I have said that the lake is mysterious. Its 
watershed does not account for its volume or 
depth. It has changed its outlet twice, first flow- 
ing one way to the Atlantic, then to the Pacific, 
and now again to the Atlantic. It is subject to 
strange storms, for which its winds do not suffi- 
ciently account. At times there passes over it a 
strange moaning sound that no one has ever been 
able to explain. Lightning strikes its surface from 
a clear sky. Is this a traveler's tale? I tell you 
true, that, more than once, the levin bolt has 
proven fatal when not a cloud was to be seen. In 
1885, one of the members of a Government sur- 
veying party was so stricken and killed. 

Its water seems like other water. It dimples in 
the wind, sparkles in the breeze. Its waves caress 
the shore with the same vague whisperings that 
other waters have, and yet, at the last, there is 
something austere about it; something chill, 
remote, inhuman. You feel about it a threat; 
a something sinister; menacing. You would 
never trust it, nor love it, as you would the Italian 
lakes or the waters of lower altitudes. Its scenery 



138 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

is magnificent, perhaps unapproached. On the 
south is Mt. Sheridan and his brothers, lofty, 
snow-capped peaks. Over there are the great 
breasts of the Three Tetons, on the east the 
^^Sleeping Lion/' and all about it vast ranges, 
fold on fold, rising one above the other to the very 
sky itself. 

I do not know of any mountain view that com- 
pares with that from the terrace of the Lake 
Hotel, when the air is just right. Certainly noth- 
ing in Switzerland, and nothing else in the Rockies, 
or Sierras, is like it. Perhaps, hidden away in 
the Andes, there may be lakes and views like this, 
but not elsewhere. 

The lake lies in shape like the human hand; 
the thumb is one of its bays, where we found an 
eating station, and whence you may go on, by 
road, past the wonderful Natural Bridge, to the 
Lake Hotel; or you may take ship and cross the 
lake, an easier and pleasanter trip. We chose the 
latter. Here an excursion crowd overtook us and, 
for the first and only time in the Park, we were over- 
crowded. Two launches await the tourist here for 



140 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

the lake trip, and, selecting the largest, we secured 
our seats and waited for the start. Waited? Yes, 
and then waited and waited some more. Finally 
we perceived the cause of our delay. 

A fat man came slowly out of the dining room, 
picking his teeth, and leisurely lit his cigar. A 
thin woman followed. The fat man stopped to 
explain something to her. The captain tooted 
his whistle. The fat man paid no attention. He 
put on his overcoat and started down the hill. We 
began to hope. All at once he stopped and, by 
his gesticulation, was evidently telling a long 
story to the thin woman. We began to hate him. 
The captain rang the bell and blew his whistle. The 
fat man acknowledged the attention and con- 
tinued to dribble down the hill at the pace of a 
nonogenarian snail. 

At last, he came near enough so we could see 
him, and then we hated him worse than ever. I 
have no personal feeling against obesity,' but this 
man was young. George Ade says that a harelip is 
a misfortune and a club foot an affliction, but that 
side whiskers are a man's own fault. I hold to the 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 141 

same view as to early avoirdupois. No young 
man has any right to be fat. It denotes a lack of 
will power, laziness, over-eating, self indulgence, 
and some more things that I will think of later. 
This creature was not only shamefully sebacious, 
l5''mphatic, a perfect jellyfish in form, but he had 
a slack jaw, a pendulous under lip. His eyes 
watered, he was unshaven, his trousers bagged, 
and, above all, he was loquacious. Talkative? 
That critter had inherited all the original seven 
baskets of talk, that Eve found under the Tree, and 
had them yet. No one is allowed to carry a gun 
up there, and I hated to kill him with my bare 
hands, because it would have mussed up my 
clothes; so he still lives. Somewhere, he pollutes 
this fair planet. Somewhere, the thin woman 
hangs upon his words and everyone else longs to 
kill him. I hope someone will. 

The lake trip was interesting. A small thunder- 
storm pursued us a long way, but finally gave it up. 
We saw an osprey fishing; saw him make his catch 
and bear it away to his nest. We saw the big 
pelicans that, in that rarefied air, look like a ship 
in the distance. 

10 



142 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

We saw two bears, that had been fishing in the 
shallow water along the shore, scramble to cover 
when they saw us, and, at last, we saw the Lake 
Hotel. To my mind, this is the most comfortable 
spot in the Park. It faces one entire length of 
the lake, is thoroughly modern in every way, 
delightfully kept, and I would have willingly 
lingered there longer. 

We had barely arrived when the porter 
informed us that it was feeding time, and we 
started for the bears. You go around the back of 
the hotel, past the meat house that is really a 
vault, logged and timbered and double locked to 
keep out the bears, follow a little road through 
thick woods and strike an open glade where the 
bears come to eat. 

We were early, but one old mother bear had 
brought her cub down to be duly in time. It was 
quite apparent, later, that this cub was not a 
favorite. He was perhaps a year old, a whiney, 
disagreeable thing, constantly starting rows, and 
he looked to his mother to take care of him. 
Twice he had to climb a tree to get away from 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 143 

some of his justly outraged comrades. I judged 
from her expression, and a few remarks she made 
to him, that his mother was beginning to get tired 
of him, and it is quite probable that, by this time, 
he is shifting for himself. The old lady showed 
every symptom of sending Little Willie to the 
orphan's home. 

One huge cinnamon brought two cubs with her, 
and sent them up a big pine to wait while she 
supped. I know of nothing more cunning, more 
attractive, than one of those cubs roosting in a 
tree. He hangs his little fat stomach over a 
branch and looks down at you with his little ears 
cocked, and his toes just out of reach, and hollers 
''Mamma!" whenever you get too close. 

By and by the supper party began to arrive. 
There were bears of all sizes and colors, their coats 
shading from the glossy black through the cinna- 
mon to a scrawny grey that looked as though the 
owner had been picked. At last, down the road 
came the cart with a steady old grey horse drawing 
it, four cans of garbage, and a whole troupe of 
kodak fiends. 



144 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



How they got that garbage cart privilege, I 
never found out — made love to the scullion, I 
suppose. Anyway, the Lady reproached me 
bitterly because she did not have a seat in that 

•I 




MEAL TIME 

garbage cart. Curious, isn't it? Just then she 
would rather have sat on a swill-can than with 
kings, emperors and potentates. So would I. 
If you go there, suborn the scullion (he is pur- 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 145 

chasable), and then you will be among the elect, 
for the cart drives right out among the bears. 
A half-grown boy gets out, tumbles down a big 
garbage can, kicks a bear, as big as the side of a 
house, out of the way, slaps another on the nose, 
and distributes his refuse in a long row so that all 
may eat. 

I thought — perhaps I was mistaken — that I 
could see their various relationships. For instance, 
one glossy little fellow seized a succulent bone 
and another of the same size grabbed the other 
end. There was no scrap; they seemed to agree, 
and dragged it off to the woods together. The 
mangy grey, the scrubbiest-looking bear in the 
lot, grabbed an enormous soupbone and, ducking 
and dodging like a quarterback with a football, 
reached the woods with it unmolested. All at 
once a row started. Just the origin of it I did not 
see, but. two magnificent big black bears were on 
their hind legs, biting and buffeting and cussing 
each other, and in a second every bear was on his 
hind legs ready for a scrap. 



146 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Meanwhile, the old she cinnamon calmly went 
about her business, taking the best in sight, while 
hei' two cubs gravely watched her with thorough 
confidence that Mamma could take care of herself 
anywhere. 

The spoiled child kept edging in, but all the 
bears seemed to have it in for him. Every 
approach of his was resented, and he had to wait 
till the last one had finished his meal and then take 
what was left. As night fell, and the great lum- 
bering forms vanished in the forest. Little Willie 
was finally permitted to come whining and sniff- 
ing for what was left, manifestly very little. 

All this time, while we were trying to edge in and 
get snapshots of them, we were continually warned 
back by the solcUer guards, when, right out there, 
in the midst of the bears, those favored beings who 
rode in royal triumph on the garbage cart, were 
getting views of them within ten feet. We were 
solemnly warned by those pampered menials of 
Uncle Sam, that it was dangerous; whereas, right 
before our eyes, the elect of the garbage cart, the 
friends of the scullion, were making bears sit up 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 147 

and look pleasant and pose like a lot of girl 
graduates. 

Don't tell me that the army is any good. Ever 
since they excluded me from the intimate associa- 
tion of those most delightful bears, and let the 
dishwasher's friends in, I am against the whole 
thing. I do not think that the simple fact that I 
was not a lifelong friend of the fourth assistant 
cook, or the onion peeler or some other kitchen 
dignitary, is any cause for a bear to bite me. I 
think I would have been just as safe out there as 
the first lady of the bedchambers, or the assistant 
custodian of the cuspidors. 

Possibly nowhere else in the Park, however, 
jesting aside, do you have so near a view of 
bruin. Nowhere else is there such a variety or so 
interesting a spectacle. There are no grizzlies, 
but every other variety in the Park, of every age 
and sex, is to be seen here; and, even with all the 
soldier warnings, you are allowed to get within 
easy snap shot of them. 

The boat company on the lake has a whole 
fleet of row boats and launches, and on a Sunday 
morning Spot and Chuck and I went fishing. 



YELLOWSTONE LAKE 149 

I knew well it was useless. I am no fisherman, 
though I have the fisherman's temperament. I 
can sit and watch a line as long as any one, if the 
bait hold out.' Years of unvarying disappoint- 
ments have steeled me to it. I know I shall 
never get a fish over the gunwale of the boat. 
But I am lucky on bites. I have as many bites 
to my record as any fisherman of my years. 
And, after all, how much better that is. I am no 
murderer. No fish can point the finger (excuse 
me, the fin) of scorn at me and say: "There goes 
the man that killed my dad." 

I have all the delicious thrill that the most 
scientific disciple of Walton ever had. I feel the 
pole bend; the line burns through my fingers; the 
reel sings its high cicada-like note; I have a bite. 
That is all. I never land him; but what matters 
that. I can buy all the fish I want to eat — fish 
that some heartless man has pulled up on the bank 
and watched their iridescent, gleaming scales fade, 
gloated over their death agony, strung them in a 
row, and gone about bragging how many there were, 
and how much they weighed. I love to fish, but 
my temperament is too gentle to catch them. 



150 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

They know it. No fish would harrow my feelings 
by making me his executioner. 

Not three hundred feet from us two soldiers 
pulled out a half dozen big ones within a half hour. 
Nearby, even a woman (and women are the worst 
of fishers, except for men) caught two, while we 
watched the lake slip tranquilly down to the 
beginning of the Yellowstone River, all unmindful 
of the rugged path it must soon travel. It was a 
heavenly day. The lake crinkled and smiled 
at us. Little mountain airs sifted down from the 
high peaks and the never-melting snows. Even 
Chuck and Spot were tamed — forbore to fuss 
with each other or to contradict their elders. We 
caught no fish, but we had a lovely day just the 
same. 

All about the Lake Hotel are charming spots — 
some by road over those splendid highways, 
and others by launch or row boats. One could 
idle away weeks there and see something always 
new, morning and night, as the sun rises or the 
moon goes down; find new paintings of cloud and 
shadow and rose and pink; new mountain effects 
or old ones retouched by a master hand. 



THE CANON AND ITS GRIZZLIES 



151 



(^i^apiev e. 



^ CANON ai^z^ GRIZZLIES I 





NE would never think, in leaving 
the Lake Hotel, and following 
the tranquil course of the Yel- 
lowstone River, that before it 
lay one of the most wonderful 
gorges, one of the stormiest and 
most turbulent passages of any stream in the 
world. It is the outlet of the lake flowing north- 
wardly to the Missouri, and we followed it for 
twenty miles. A placid, domestic sort of a river; 
no rapids; no falls; just meandering lazily along as 
though it had little to do and no hurry about 
that. Nowhere are its banks precipitous, nor 
its scenery startling. 

Just after you leave the Lake Hotel, across the 
valley of the Yellowstone, you observe a great hill 
all white on its side. That is the celebrated 



132 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Sulphur^Mountain, where pure sulphur is turned 
out in nature's laboratory while you wait. If this 
were a commercial proposition, its slopes would be 
lined, like ^tna, with sulphur miners; but, as it is, 
the sulphur simply accumulates year after year. 

When the Washburne party passed down the 
Yellowstone, in 1870, they found on this same 
road a new mud volcano. The foliage on the 
trees was hardly withered, yet covered with mud, 
for three hundred yards around, thrown from this 
new crater. That volcano is now extinct, but 
another has formed within a stone's throw from 
the road. Just as a curiosity it is worth observ- 
ing, but I had rather not be a neighbor to it. 

The crater is, perhaps, a hundred feet across — - 
a boiling seething nasty basin of sticky-looking 
mud; a witch's caldron that heaves and bub- 
bles and, now and then, explodes with terrific vio- 
lence, throwing its evil smelling contents for a 
hundred feet around. There is always warning 
enough to escape the eruptions, but it is exciting 
enough at that. 

Of all the freaks in the Park I think this is the 



THE CANON AND ITS GRIZZLIES 153 

most repulsive, yet one of the most interesting. 
Once more I pause to inquire. Tell me, you scien- 
tific sharps, where does the mud come from, and 
why does it not exhaust in time? You give it up? 
I don't blame you. You can explain most 
things, but the Yellowstone keeps you guessing. 
Just beside the mud volcano is a little gem of a 
cave, all glowing with gold and azure from 
mineral deposits. From its side, rhythmically 
pulsating, a little jet of sulphur water is cast 
against the opposite side. 

All about, the ground reeks with sulphur. 
Little vapors issue from cracks in the ground. 
Hades is close. It is interesting, but uncom- 
fortable. From Sulphur Mountain, five miles 
away on the other side of the river, and clear 
underneath it to this spring, there is some sub- 
terranean connection, for the ground all smells 
alike. 

It is all sulphur. The mud smells of sulphur; 
the rocks and the very foliage emit the odor. 

Half way to the cafion we enter Crane Valley, 
the largest of the great valleys and famous for 



154 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

its spring round-up of elk. In the mating season, 
the elk gather by thousands. MacBride says 
there are forty thousand elk in the Park. It 
seems incredible; he knows, however. Bands of 
six to eight thousand are not uncommon. When 
the spring opens and the fresh grass starts and 
the time for new families arrives, the mating is 
done here. It is said to be a wonderful sight. 
Thousands and thousands of elk, the bulls bellow- 
ing and fighting, love-making and marrying, and 
then away to the high hills for the summer season. 

Much of the water in the valley is unfit for use, 
but here and there is a spring of pure water care- 
fully protected. 

As a free citizen, I have a right to criticise my 
government, and I think I can see many ways in 
which the Park administration might be better; 
but, in all justice, a great work has been done 
here. The road system is worthy of unstinted 
praise. All the roads are good, well graded, well 
kept, and many of them are macadamized. 
Throughout the summer the main roads are sprin- 
kled, so that there is no dust — that plague of reg- 



THE CANON AND ITS GRIZZLIES 155 

ular staging. At frequent intervals rare springs 
and drinking places are marked — in fact, every 
spot of interest is marked, and the guideboards 
and distance marks keep you always on the right 
road. Thousands of strangers from the nearby 
states go through in wagons each year, camping 
on the way; and they need no guides, for the Park 
is thoroughly charted and marked. 

The worst trouble with camping is the bears, 
for some one must always be left in camp. In 
fact, if they are protected a few years longer, they 
will just about take the Park. Already they are 
so numerous and so fearless that they are a 
nuisance to camping parties. 

As we approach the Canon Hotel the scenery 
becomes more rugged, wilder. The river becomes 
more turbulent with a swifter fall. 

We cross Cascade Creek, a tributary of the 
Yellowstone, where Colonel Norris found carved 
in a tree some nearly defaced initials and the 
date 1819, supposedly made by some white 
trapper, nearly a hundred years ago, who had left 
no other record of his presence here. 



156 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

The Canon Hotel is a big, barny looking building, 
but charming inside. It stands on high ground, 
looking far up and down the Yellowstone, and 
this is the place where you see the grizzlies. 

Just why no one knows, but hardly any other 
bears come here. No one cares to bother a silver 
tip. He prefers solitude and gets it. No one 
cares to neighbor with them, for you never know 
when they may take a notion to charge you. A 
stableman for one of the transportation companies 
was out a couple of miles from the Canon Hotel 
one night, looking for stray horses. As he entered 
a little glade, a big bull elk dashed through closely 
pursued by a grizzly. The stableman yelled, the 
grizzly stopped a moment, and then started after 
him. As he expressed it, ''I just natchully faded 
away. I reckon that atmosphere is all het up 
yet with the way I come through it." They are 
afraid of nothing. When you consider that they 
get to weigh all the way up to a ton or more, and 
many stand eight feet high when erect, 'you 
realize that they are not family pets. 

The feeding hour at the Canon Hotel is five 



THE CANON AND ITS GRIZZLIES 



157 



o'clock, and you perceive at once that here is 
something different from anything you have seen. 
No garbage cart, with its load of favored beings, 
enters this enclosure. The garbage is taken out 
early, before the grizzlies come. A stout fence of 




LOOKING FOR THE DRIVER 

barbed wire keeps visitors at a distance, and five 
soldiers, heavily armed, stand guard. 

The little fellows come first. They gallop down 
the steep slope, grab their supper, swallow it 
quickly, always with an eye on the woods above 
the slope. Then the first of the big fellows 
emerges. Very leisurely he descends, and as he 

11 



158 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



approaches every one of the youngsters flees. 
You get a realizing sense of grizzly manners. 

There is no courtesy here. 

The biggest is first. Even 

after the older ones have 

*^ % gathered, the biggest is 

JR hB boss. If he sees one an 

^mj^t^Jgm ^^ch smaller than him- 

that he wants, 
he simply walks 
over and the 
smaller one 
drops it with 
an apology. 
The biggest of 
all of them was 
a formidable 
brute, five feet 
high at the 
shoulders. 

I have seen swashbucklers and bullies, but I 
never saw his equal. He lumbered and swag- 




GETTING A CHOICE BIT 



THE CANON AND ITS GRIZZLIES 159 

gered about; took what suited him, chased the 
smaller bears away, and made himself generally 
disagreeable. His manners, however, did not 
differ from the rest. They are all alike. I wish 
to record this impression now, in confidence, not 
to be repeated to any grizzly of your acquaintance, 
that a grizzly bear is the meanest critter that 
walks. He is unsocial, selfish, grumpy, sour, 
greedy, cruel, unhandsome, uncouth, ungraceful, 
a misanthrope by nature and a brute by culti- 
vation. 

If he has any redeeming qualities, I have failed 
to find them after careful study. Even a tiger 
purrs occasionally. Mr. Grizzly's only language 
is a growl. 

He neglects his family, stays out nights — he 
does everything. Just think up all the mean 
attributes you know of and you will find that the 
grizzly has all of them and some others. 

They are the only bears whomever leave the Park. 
It is fortunate they do so, for, in that way, they 
get thinned out a little. The moment they leave 
the confines of the reservation they are fair game. 



160 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Last year there were six grizzly cubs who always 
came together. They were just the same size, 
looked alike, and always traveled in a bunch. At 
an early hour, they would come, all six, galloping 
down the hill for supper, and they came to be 
known as the Galloping Six. This year they were 
missing. They have never shown up. More or 
less the different bears came to be known to the 
hotel people. But no Galloping Six returned 
with the advent of spring and the reopening of the 
hotel. 

So we conjecture that, adventurous, as all 
grizzlies are, tired of the monotony of the Park, 
they took an excursion and now their hides are 
rugs. 

In the Sierras the grizzlies were the first bears 
to be wiped out. The black and the cinnamon 
are still found there, but the grizzly, fearless, 
adventurous, met his conqueror, man, and per- 
ished. Today, one may travel the remote trails 
of the Sierras for a year and never see a grizzly. 

I once knew an old Forty- Niner, Jim Bethel by 
name, who kept a little roadside joint, on the 



THE CANON AND ITS GRIZZLIES 161 

North Fork stage road, in the Sierras. Jim came 
to CaUfornia a boy of eighteen and had his first 
adventure with a grizzly that summer. He was 
hunting in the high hills and ran across a big 
grizzly, astride a rotten log, stripping the bark for 
grubs. Jim was armed with a rifle and one of the 
old-fashioned dragoon pistols that carried a half- 
ounce ball. Following advice that had been 
given to him, he first selected a handy cedar tree 
with plenty of branches and took a shot at the 
bear with his rifle. Without stopping to see its 
effect, he dropped the rifle and started up the tree. 
As he expressed it, he was twenty feet up before 
his rifle hit the ground. However, nothing hap- 
pened. The bear tumbled off the log and disap- 
peared. After waiting until he felt safe, Jim 
descended. He wore his black hair long, as was 
common in those days, and most of it seemed to be 
missing. Looking up, he found the whole cedar 
tree decorated with his hair — a bunch here, a 
bunch there, where he had left it on the way up. 

Here is another of Jim's stories: In 1850, they 
were placer mining on Fine Gold Creek, a big 



162 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

camp. One day the whole camp went out for a 
bear hunt. In the party were two chums, Bill and 
Dick. The party separated and, after a while, 
Bill heard Dick's rifle fired and then his pistol. 
He hurried in the direction of the shot and found 
Dick in a death grapple with a grizzly. Bill was 
noted for his courage, and, without hesitation, 
took a hand in the fight. The bear had Dick 
down and was chewing him. As Bill approached, 
the bear raised his head and opened his mouth 
to growl. Bill fired straight into his mouth 
with his big dragoon pistol and the bear dropped. 
It had been a fight all right. The little clearing 
was strewn with blood and hair and fur and hide. 
They picked poor Dick up and carried him back to 
the camp. Fortunately, a doctor was there, and 
he decided that Dick would live; but he had been 
scalped. A swipe of the great paw had carried 
away a patch of the scalp as big as a man's hand. 
The doctor declared that if he had the scalp he 
could sew it on and save it. They went back and 
found the scalp. The doctor cleansed it, sewed 
it on, and Dick got well. Bethel saw him in Sacra- 



THE CANON AND ITS GRIZZLIES 163 

mento a couple of years later, and he was sound 
and well, his scalp all there, but the hair on that 
patch had died and looked like dead grass. 

No man as old as Jim Bethel would tell a lie, 
and I accept these stories as the gospel truth. 
The first time I stopped in Jim's joint — a log cabin 
with sanded floor and a pine bar — I saw on the 
shelf two bottles of Mumm's Extra Dry. I never 
found out how they got there. I asked Jim what 
it was. He said it was some kind of fizzy stuff- 
that was in the joint when he bought it. I asked 
him its price. He allowed it ought to be worth 
fifty cents a bottle, and so I bought those two 
bottles for fifty cents apiece, up there in the hills, 
where the freight alone was worth that much. 
Now that Jim is dead, I have sometimes regretted 
the advantage I took of him. I think it is the 
only trade I ever made, of which I got the 
better end. 

Two of our party (I keep their names a secret) 
went out in the woods near the Cafion Hotel on a 
bear hunt. Not to kill; just to hunt. You can 
not go a half-mile anywhere thereabouts without 



164 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

running on to bears. Fortunately these adven- 
turers found no silver-tips, just cinnamons, and 
chased them up trees and batted them with sticks, 
and then got chased in turn and had a good time. 
Spot — there, the story is out — will doubtless tell 
his children how he chased a cinnamon bear up a 
tree and whacked him on the rump with a club. 
And his children will think, ^^ What a liar Papa is.'* 
I have used the term '^silver-tip" once or twice. 
I am not sure about it, but I believe the silver-tip 
is a mere variant of the true grizzly. I believe 
that, in colder climates, the end of each hair is a 
silver color. The Sierra bears are the plain 
grizzly, but most of the grizzlies that I saw in 
the Yellowstone were silver-tips. Anyway, the 
names are used interchangeably up there. You 
may take your choice. I regret that I have not 
consulted Mr. Roosevelt about it. I am a desira- 
ble citizen, no nature fakir, and I am not anxious 
to have a controversy with the President. I, 
therefore, submit the statement with due caution. 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 



165 



^hapUv n. 




j7^^ DUDGEON SMILED 

UST above the Canon Hotel, the 
Yellowstone anticipates its long 
descent to the Missouri. It con- 
tracts, begins to boil and foam 
and show its angry whitecaps 
just where the park engineers 
have thrown across it a magnificent bridge of 
concrete — a single arch, a cobweb-like structure, 
that seems held in air by a continuous miracle. 
From that bridge the view is superb. From 
above, the water comes clamoring and breaking, 
green and frothy, rushing swiftly to its Upper 
Falls, whose smooth green lip you can see just 
below. Elsewhere this Upper Fall would be 
enough. Its distinction and peculiar charm 
would make it a place of ^pilgrimage from far and 



166 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

near. It thunders down a hundred feet to a 
rocky shelf and, striking that, hurls itself outward 
in a boiling smother of spray and foam, shouting 
its triumphant descent far above its rocky walls. 

It is, perhaps, a half-mile to the Lower Falls — 
the Falls of the Yellowstone — and, after you have 
seen that, the Upper Fall is forgotten, for, to my 
mind, the Falls of the Yellowstone are the most 
beautiful I have ever seen. There are others 
higher, wider, of greater volume, but none has 
such a superb setting, so graciously proportioned, 
so perfect in every way. 

The descent of the Upper Fall brings the river 
through a gorge, some five hundred feet deep, to 
the Lower Fall, The shelf over which it leaps is 
of porphyry and, on each side, great porphyry 
cliffs narrow and confine it to its perfect propor- 
tions. It is curious, but this is the only porphy- 
ritic formation in the Park, and you can see from 
below how, in the incalculable ages, the river, by 
erosion, has carried the falls back and back, leaving 
behind the wonderful Cafion of the Yellowstone, 
till it struck this porphyritic wall that has with- 
stood the wear of centuries. 



GREAT FALLS OF THE YELLOWSTONE 



168 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

From the main road above, you descend a flight 
of steps to a little platform on the brink, where 
you may reach out your hand and touch the very 
lip of the fall, and from which you may follow its 
descent to the bottom — 360 feet they call it, but no 
one has truly plumbed it, and no one knows 
exactly how far it is. But you forget its height 
when you see it. There is nothing in nature as 
beautiful as falling water, and here is its ultimate 
expression, its finest picture, its very climax. 

Those iron cliffs force the stream to a narrow 
bed as it rushes over the edge. Where it breaks 
it is a deep dark green, smooth as velvet. The lip 
is slightl}^ convex, over hanging, so that the water 
falls clear, in one long leap, and, by its conforma- 
tion, separates the fall very slightly into three half 
cylindrical volutes. The nearer one is a pale rose, 
on the outside of the corrugations — a rose that 
lightens, then changes to opal, and finally, in its 
very heart, to lightest green. The second is a 
paler rose, while the third carries on its surface 
a lace work of black. At first I thought that 
black lace work was debris, but it is not; it must be 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 169 

5ome optical illusion. However, there it is, a 
perfect lace work, changing, of course, but always 
there. As they fall they unite, the whole tint 
deepens, and then, from the boiling caldron below, 
rises a rose-colored mist. And all these color 
effects are independent of light conditions. It 
matters not, at sunrise or sunset, at high noon, or 
even by the light of a full moon, the effect is the 
same. I know not what incarnadines that 
ceaseless changing flood, nor what exhales that 
rose-colored mist from the profound; but I have a 
theory that it is the aeration of the water by its 
clean descent and tremendous fall. It is water 
that falls in that green cascade from the lip, and 
water that escapes below, but that which falls, in 
falling, is not water; neither is it mist or spray or 
foam. It is more tenuous than water, and too 
palpable for. mist or spray. It is, in fact, sepa- 
rate drops forced apart by pressure, each a tiny 
prism refracting and blending the light rays. 
And to this, these falls owe their peculiar charm 
and distinction, different from all others. 



170 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Many have raved over the Grand Canon of the 
Yellowstone below the falls, and many absurdities 
have been written about its awe-inspiring depths. 
To my mind, its chief charm is the setting it 
affords these falls. It is not so vast that the 
waterfall is lost in its immensity, as it would be 
in the Grand Canon of the Colorado. Nor is it 
petty. It is simply in perfect proportion with the 
falls. Either would lose much of its charm 
without the other. 

It is from this canon (the color of the rock) that 
the whole region derives its name of Yellowstone 
or yellow rock. The prevailing tint is yellow, 
mixed with browns and, occasionally, a bit that is 
almost black, all blended and harmonized by the 
erosion of ages. It is beautiful, picturesque, what 
you will, but not awesome or dreadful. In fact, 
it looked so beautiful from above, so friendly- 
like, so accessible, that one day the Banker and I, 
hanging above the fall, decided we would descend 
and explore its beauties from below. We were 
moved to it by the fact that we saw down there — 
mere specks along the sandy marge of the green, 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 171 

white-capped flood — a party among whom were 
women. We thought the view of the fall from 
below would be worth remembering, and it was; 
and it was down there that Dudgeon smiled. 

We did not know, and Dudgeon did not know, 
that there had once been a stairway from the 
other side of the river descending below the fall; 
that, becoming dangerous, it had been destroyed; 
that, in our day, no one attempts that descent 
without ropes and competent guides. 

Call us fools if you will — I shall not object — for 
we rushed in where no angel, that thought any- 
thing of his wings, would have cared to tread. 

The next morning, without seeking advice, we 
three (the Banker, Dudgeon and myself) jogged 
across the great bridge and down the roadway 
that overlooks the beautiful upper gorge. 

A little group of deer, grazing on the slope 
above us, stopped and gazed with their great 
tranquil eyes. The Upper Fall shouted at us 
unnoticed. We found the little path that de- 
scends to the bottom of the gorge, tied our horses, 
and started down. At the brink there was a sign 
that remarked, in the most casual way, '^Danger." 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 173 

Dudgeon and I had a discussion as to whether it 
meant bears or female tourists, Dudgeon holding 
to the latter view. In the meanwhile, the Banker 
had plunged down and we followed. At the very 
edge we found a tiny chasm down w^hich trickles, 
at times, a little stream, just enough to till the 
cleft with moisture and to make it slippery. The 
bed was loose float-rock and gravel that slid and 
slipped under our feet. 

''The wicked stand in slippery places." I 
always fall and I did so, promptly. If I had been 
in the lead, I should have abandoned the expe- 
dition right there; but Dudgeon and the Banker 
had gone and I was ashamed not to follow. At 
the bottom of the cleft there was a sheer descent. 
Along its precipitous wall, however, were little 
juts and a place where, sometime, some one had 
ventured down. I shall not describe the descent; 
it was not so bad: 
''Come with me, and it please ye; 
"The down hill path is easy. 
"We shall avoid the uphill by never turning 
back.'' 

12 



174 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

At the bottom, we found a long ridge, fifty feet 
above the water, that envisaged the fall. For 
myself, I was content to rest there while Dudgeon 
and the Banker pursued a path of slippery granite 
to the bottom of the gorge, where the water ran 
blue and white, full of foam from its mad descent 
above. They found that the sand along the river 
brink was hot, from the innumerable hot springs 
that here break out along its edge. But there 
was nothing dangerous here. Fierce as it looked, 
steeply as it ran, it was shallow, and, while it 
frothed and fumed and made much of itself, it 
was not alarming. 
''Says Tweed to Till 

'' 'What gars ye rin sae still? ^ 
" Says Till to Tweed 

" 'Though ye rin wi speed 
" 'And I rin slow 

" 'Where ye droon a man, I droon twa.' " 

For the Yellowstone seems but a shallow brook 
there, between those vast walls, dwarfed by the 
fall and the great canon ; and, while it has all the 
charm of the river above, all the changing Hghts, 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 175 

the wonderful iridescence, and you can sit and 
watch it play with its rock and pebbles, it does 
not frighten you. You lay your hand upon the 
white mane of its galloping regiments without 
fear. You grow after awhile to love it; you long 
to wade in it, to see how deep it is. It has a 
perilous fascination, for there are perils in it. 

But you forget the stream and the canon and 
everything else, as you look from below at the 
falls. From the verj^ bottom springs one great 
wonderful rainbow, a perfect arch, as steadfast 
as though it were of steel, one foot resting on the 
whirlpool and the other on the rock at the right. 
It does not waver or quiver. It does not dissolve 
and reappear as other rainbows. And two hun- 
dred feet above, where one little spurt of spray 
strikes a jut of stone, is a baby rainbow that 
comes and goes and plays against the sombre 
porphyritic rock, rising and falling, now close to 
the rock, now venturing outwardly into the very 
mass of the fall. 

Seen from below, the falls are even more 
stupendous, more beautifiil than from above. 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 177 

Heights are greater when you look up than when 
you look down, and the falls seem greater from 
there at their feet. 

From this ridge where I stood ran a path in the 
granite — not a path, just a track that seemed to 
lead behind the fall itself. I am sure that nothing 
but a mountain sheep had ever trod that perilous 
way. I happened to wonder to Dudgeon as we 
sat there (the spray from the fall wetting our 
faces, and the great wind that the whirlpool makes 
blowing about us) where the track went. 

Instantly Dudgeon was up, laid his hat down, 
weighted it with a stone to keep it from blowing 
away, and, before I could stop him, was dancing 
down that dizzy shelf, as lightly and sure-footed 
as a chamois. I called him in vain. 

He went as easily, as carelessly, as you or I 
would walk a city pavement, to the very edge of 
the falls, ■ where he could look behind that mar- 
velous curtain of mist and spray and foam — 
looked into its very heart of rose and opal and 
emerald; looked as unconcernedly as I look at 
this page — and came dancing back, pausing to 



178 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

wave his hand at the Lady and the Little Lady 
far above on the brink of the fall. 

Believe me, I would part with much of what 
I have gained during the last hundred and fifty 
years of my pilgrimage to have been able to do 
that. And he did it and smiled. 

Above me loomed that awful chasm that must 
be climbed. It hung over me — settled on my 
spirits. I tried to smile; to admire the falls; I 
tried to enjoy that wonderful gorge, with its color- 
ing, its beauty, its charm. I watched an eagle 
leave his eyrie on the very edge of the caiion and 
soar above me, wings atilt, without movement, 
and I led my companions into a discussion of 
flying machines and the problem of aviation. I 
drew their attention to a place on the rocks oppo- 
site, where the continuous spray had mottled 
its sombre brown with a living green of moss. 

I did everything that would hold their attention 
and postpone the hour when I must start back. 
At last, every subject exhausted, the Banker 
suddenly started upward. From our little cliff 
that overhung the maelstrom, the path led up a 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 179 

bare rock. When I looked at it in cold blood, I 
wondered how I ever descended it without wings. 
I knew in my heart that I could never get back, 
but the Banker started. It was a sheer cliff, with 
here and there a crack, a toe-hold, or finger-hold 
as far apart as one could reach. I saw him 
toilsomely reach from one to the other, spread- 
eagled against the rock face. At one place, a 
rock, that he grasped with his right hand, as he 
threw his weight on it, gave way, glanced over his 
arm, and just missed his head. He swung far out- 
ward and I shuddered, I thought he was gone, 
and his body a mangled mass on the rocks a 
hundred feet below. By a miracle his left hand 
held, and he still pursued his way, inch by inch. 

I said to Dudgeon, '^ I never can make that, 
but you must stay below and catch me if I slip." 
And Dudgeon smiled. 

Like most men, I am a coward when there is 
no one around. Here were no admiring crowds 
to see me risk my life. No one but Dudgeon. 
How I scaled that awful cliff, I shall never know, 
I think I was years doing it. I hung there, some- 



180 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

times by * two fingers of each hand, my toes 
inserted into some tiny crack, panting for 
breath, benumbed, speechless, sweating at every 
pore. Sometimes it seemed hours before I could 
move. Dudgeon meanwhile gathering from my 
attitude that, whether I ever attained the top, I 
would never fall — that with the grip I had on the 
rock I might cling there and turn to a lichen, some 
new and curious form of vegetation that scientists 
in after years would investigate with profound 
interest, but that I would never let go my hold — 
danced around and above me and sat safe and 
secure and smiled at me. To do him justice, 
there never was a place on that rock face where he 
could have helpfed me without a rope. If I had 
fallen, nothing could have stopped me but the 
bottom. If he had been below me we should have 
gone together, and Dudgeon did not intend to be 
on the under side of that fall. I was safe enough 
as long as I stood still. My body in my anguish 
put out spores and tentacles that grasped the rock. 
I was for a time a limpet, one of those intermedi- 
ate forms of life that cling and cling and never 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 181 

move. It was when I tried to progress that the 
strain became too great. The Banker had van- 
ished. Dudgeon was somewhere far above me 
whistling ^^My Bonnie," and there I clung, a mere 
gastropod. I doubt if, in those awful moments, 
I had any more intelligence than a vegetable. All 
I felt was fear — fear of those spear-like rocks 
down there below me. 

What a curious thing pride is! If I had been 
alone with Dudgeon I should have called for rope 
and tackle and a hoisting engine. But the Banker 
had passed before me, and so, however Dudgeon 
smiled, I could not quit. 

I knew that, at the very top, awaited me that 
terrible rocky slide, almost perpendicular and 
slimed with past ages of moisture. When I 
thought of that I was ready to die, but when I had 
attained it, there, hanging from the top of the 
path, was a rope. 

Believe me, that no triple tie, no chain of logic, 
nothing that impUes continuity, clinging, connec- 
tion, or anything else that begins with a capital 
C, ever looked so good. 



182 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

All of this was at an altitude of 7,000 feet, 
which, for a lowlander, implies the very limit of 
bellows power. Somehow I grasped that rope. 
Somehow I scrambled up that rocky slide by its 
aid and sank half fainting at the top. There was 
not air enough in the universe to satisfy me. The 
wide scope of the heavens, of the starry skies, did 
not contain enough atmosphere to fill my starved 
and laboring lungs. 

And, shame of shames, just behind us, climbing 
swiftly, came a lady dressed in grey serge, mount- 
ing those awful slopes easily and gracefully, start- 
ing many minutes behind me and overtaking me 
at the top without a quickened breath. It was 
she who had left the rope there for that last three 
hundred feet, without which I should never have 
attained the top. She had followed us down, but, 
being a wise mountain climber, had left the rope 
where it was most needed. 

When I had made her acquaintance, I was not 
so much ashamed. An employe of a Washington 
department, she had made her summer outing like 
this for years. She had climbed Mt. Shasta and 



AND DUDGEON SMILED 183 

many others. Slie had made a walking tour of 
the Park, one hundred and sixty miles, and this 
little climb was a mere side trip to her, while to me 
it was the mountain climb of my life. 

Slowly and painfully the Banker and I climbed 
the rest of the hill. Slowly and painfully we 
got into our surrey, and invited the grey lady to 
share a seat to her destination across the river. 
We gathered up her rope, whose charitable sinews 
had saved, at least, one unworthy life, and parted 
with her, just this side of the Cation Hotel, at her 
tent home. Had it not been for that lady in grey 
these pages would not have been written. I 
should still be sitting, ^'never flitting," like Poe's 
Raven, at the bottom of that rocky slide, croaking 
"nevermore," or else clinging, an ancient and ill- 
smelling gastropod, to those rocky walls. Where- 
ever she is, may heaven go with her. 

Meanwhile Dudgeon had danced and jigged his 
way up those slopes, whistling "My Bonnie," and, 
when we finally seated ourselves in the surrey, he 
was as unbreathed as though he had just finished 
a two-step. 



184 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

If you go clown the corridor of the Canon 
Hotel, and turn to the right, at the second door 
you can find something in a glass with ice in it; 
and there once more Dudgeon smiled. 



UNTRODDEN WAYS 



85 



^hapUv XXX. 





UNTRODDEN WAYS 



THE Canon Hotel, the ways 
divide. The stage lines run 
westwardly to Norris Basin, and, 
stopping there for lunch, make an 
afternoon's drive to Mammoth 
Hot Springs, on the northern 
boundary of the Park. 

The ladies elected to go that way while we, 
with Dudgeon and our surrey, pursued the unfre- 
quented road directly north to the petrified forest, 
the buffalo plateau, thence back to Camp Roose- 
velt and west to Mammoth Springs. 

^'Untrodden ways" is a slight exaggeration, 
but, while the road is good, it is little used by tour- 
ists who follow the stage route. But if you have 
the time, it is the only way. Up to this point I 



186 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



had been surprised to find so little mountain 
scenery except far away, almost on the boundaries 
of the Park. This region is the scenic corner of 
the Park and, for one who 
has time to stay, the most 
delightful part. 

It abounds in magnificent 
mountain views, vast forests 
interpersed with beautiful 




•-•^-^' 



DEER RESTING IN THE WOODS 



UNTRODDEN WAYS 187 

meadows, canons and waterfalls, peaks and hills. 
While there are a few hot springs, there are no 
geysers, but the scenery is as beautiful as any 
that can be found in the Rockies. 

From the Canon Hotel the road winds upward 
over Dunraven Pass, a little depression between 
Dunraven Peak and Mt. Washburne. The latter is 
the highest mountain in the Park, and there is a 
fairly easy road to its top. We did not go to the 
top, as it was a misty day and the view would not 
have been good. It had rained the night before 
we started, and, as the road is little traveled, we 
were the first over it. It was an interesting study 
to watch the signs of animal life in the tracks along 
the road. Chuck and Spot developed great sagac- 
ity in determining the animals to which they 
belonged. 

In one place on a single line were the tracks 
of a' bear, a coyote and a deer. Which was fleeing 
and which pursuing they were unable to deter- 
mine. In places a whole band of elk had crossed 
the road, and everywhere were the records of the 
busy animal life that fills the Park and is most 
numerous here where the travel is least. 



188 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



Three times that morning bears crossed the 
road ahead of us, as unconcerned as a tramp on a 
country road. One stopped and sniffed at us till 

we were within 
ten feet of him. 
At a turn of the 
road,, before we 
reached the Pass, 
a little band of 
mule deer were 
feeding. They 
were so tame 
that I slipped 
from the surrey 
to get a snap- 
shot. The leader 
was a magnifi- 
cent buck, his 
coat as glossy as 

EVENING NEAR GRAND CANON V C 1 V C t . H C 

raised his head and eyed me, while I crept within 
ten feet of him. He was in the shade of a tree 
and after the first shot I tried to move him out 




UNTRODDEN WAYS 189 

into the sun^ but he slowly moved off into the 
thick woods, and my picture was not a success. 
I wish it had been, for there was never a hand- 
somer sight than that noble beast, his head 
up, his spreading antlers, his great liquid eyes 
surveying me with the utmost calmness. Behind 
him were several doe and fawns equally uncon- 
cerned. They started when I clicked the camera, 
but the great buck never moved. He might have 
been posing for pictures all his life, for all the con- 
cern he showed. I shall long carry that picture 
of the grassy slope, the evergreen woods behind, 
and those beautiful creatures who seemed to trust 
us so implicitly. 

On the shoulder of Mt. Washburne was a great 
band of elk, I could not estimate how many. The 
hillside was covered with them. They are shyer 
than the deer, as they go to the higher altitudes in 
the sumnaer, and are not so familiar with men. 
In fact, the only elk I saw in the Park were on this 
road. They are not as beautiful as the deer. 
Their necks are ill-shaped and they carry their 
heads awkwardly; but it is something in this day 



190 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



to see a thousand elk in one band quietly feeding. 
I am told that it is not uncommon to see five 
thousand in a band in the spring and early- 
summer. 

I have heard 
the expression, 
''carpeted with 
flowers/' many 
times, but I never 
saw such a car- 
pet save here. 
The whole slope 
of Mt. Wash- 
burne is literally 
covered; so that 
the green of the 
grass, which is 
abundant, is abso- 
lutely hidden by 
them. They count eighty varieties of wild 
flowers in the Park, many of them rare. . There 
were dozens that I never saw, but I recognized 
many of the old favorites that I have known in 




A BUFFALO HEAD 



UNTRODDEN WAYS 191 

lower altitudes, such as the columbine, larkspur, 
paintbrush, and others. 

At a turn of the road, before we reached the 
Pass, we found the most beautiful view of the trip. 
Looking back we could see nearly the whole 
extent of Yellowstone Lake, twenty-five miles 
away, with Mt. Sheridan and the Three Tetons, 
dim shapes, beyond. Nearer was the course of the 
Yellowstone, but the Carion Hotel was hidden. 
Near where it should have been I saw a tiny 
green semi-circle that puzzled me. With the 
glass I found that it was the concrete bridge 
above the Falls, with the green of the water show- 
ing through the archway. The Upper Falls could 
be distinctly seen, but the Lower were hidden by 
the canon. 

Before we reached the point where the road up 
Mt. Washburne turns off the main road, we over- 
took the lady in grey who had so put me to shame 
at the caiion. She was trudging along, bent on 
making the trip to the top. She made it, through 
one rain and one snowstorm, and joined us at 
Camp Roosevelt, about five. 




V^v 



CHRISTMAS TREE PARK 



UNTRODDEN WAYS 193 

When the Pass is surmounted, and you turn the 
great flank of Mt. Washburne, you are in the most 
beautiful part of the Park, httle known. Much 
of the timber of the Park is lodge-pole pine. But 
here magnificent forests of spruce and fir and pine 
alternate with great meadows that stretch for 
miles, clothed with the succulent gramma grass, 
a paradise for ruminant animals. Before you 
stretches the Valley of the Yellowstone; beyond it 
the great range that bars the eastern approach 
to the Park, and far to the northward another 
great mountain chain. On either side, coming 
into the Yellowstone, are gorges and cafions, 
each a marvel in itself. 

A storm followed us a while, passed to our left, 
in front, to the right, and vanished on Mt. Wash- 
burne, actually traveling clear around us. As it 
passed, it left the ragged clouds and mist wraiths 
hanging far down the slopes of the hills till the 
sun vanquished them. 

Nature was in her most theatrical mood, and 
showed us every variety of storm and sunshine. 



194 . BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Eighteen miles from the Canon Hotel are the 
Tower Falls, named from the curious tower-like 
rocks that surround the Tower Creek Canon. 

I am told that the falls are beautiful. 
Dudgeon told me so. I sent him down to see. 
No more climbing for me while Dudgeon is around. 
I just send him out and he reports faithfully. 
Chuck and Spot went part way, and the Banker 
even essayed the descent, but soon returned. 
Dudgeon galloped down and loped back and 
advised us to go and see them. 

I did not, but you may take Dudgeon's word for 
it that they are very fine. Just beyond are the 
basalt cliffs, the only formation of the kind, I 
believe, in the Park. On the right, across the Canon 
of the Yellowstone, crowning its top, is a basalt 
formation two or three miles long and as regular 
as a fence. In fact, from a distance, it looks like 
some inclosure. Dudgeon called it the base ball 
ground. Below, the river runs through a narrow 
gorge, some five hundred feet deep, with almost 
perpendicular walls, and on the left is another vast 
basalt wall. The road had to be quarried 



UNTRODDEN WAYS 195 

beneath, and in some places it overhangs the road. 
It is a ticklish road, though perfectly safe, for, on 
one side the cliff goes down sheer five hundred feet 
to the river, and, on the other, the great cliff stands 
imminent and threatening. But most curious of 
all the Park formations, this vast cliff, three hun- 
dred feet high (I should think) rests at the level 
of the roadway on a bed of river gravel. It has 
imposed itself on the silt and detritus of some old 
river, or else upon glacial drift. Where did it 
come from, and how did it get there? Of course, 
this whole region shows glacial action of the great- 
est, that has shaved and pared the whole Park, 
so that Mt. Washburne is almost the only high 
peak within its limits, and even that is hardly any- 
where bold or abrupt, and a wagon road goes to its 
top with little difficulty. 

Just above the Yellowstone Falls is a great 
granite boulder, twenty feet high and as many 
thick, brought there by a glacier and dropped; 
for there is no granite within miles of this 
detached fragment. 



196 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

All along the road through here are directions 
for camping parties, '^Good water here." ^'Bury 
all tin cans." "Fnt out fires carefully." It is a 
very paternal government up here, especially for 
the four-legged anim.als. 

We reached Camp Roosevelt in time for a late 
lunch. It is so called, I believe, because the Pres- 
ident once passed by there and looked at it. 
There is also a big Douglas spruce called the 
Roosevelt tree, because the President is supposed 
to have seen it. 

The Camp is set in a charming grove, with tent 
houses and tents for cooking and dining. Back of 
it a little stream comes giggling down the hill, 
enjoying some little joke of its own; and farther 
back is another canon. I sent Dudgeon up to see 
it and he reported it as three hundred and eighty 
feet, nine inches, deep, and seven hundred and thir- 
teen feet wide. This must be a justly propor- 
tioned cafion. I am glad Dudgeon saw it. There 
is nothing like being accurate about these things, 
and Dudgeon is one of the most accurate liars I 
have ever kn'own. He never makes loose state- 



UNTRODDEN WAYS 197 

meiits. I came near losing Dudgeon here. He 
sat down to rest with Chuck, and, instead of sitting 
in a safe place, picked a spot where he could hang 
his legs over. The stone under him crumbled 
and, if Chuck had not grabbed him, Dudgeon would 
have investigated the depth of that canon in two- 
four time. 

I have already recorded how, here, I made that 
acquaintance with Billy which was so brutally 
and unfortunately interrupted. 

We spent the evening at bridge, and Camp 
Roosevelt is celebrated for one more achievement : 
I made the record score — grand slam, four aces 
in one hand and the rubber game. Chuck and 
Spot robbed the Banker and me at bridge all 
through the trip, and we paid our losses in cash. 
This time we beat them — our score was a big one — • 
and they calmly told us they would settle when 
they got home. We are still w^aiting for that 
settlement. 

We had planned to spend the following day in 
a drive through the petrified forest to the Buffalo 
Plateau, in the extreme northeastern part of the 



198 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Park. There are many wonders up there; the 
"petrified forest," of which Jim Bridger told being 
the greatest. There is an amethyst mountain 
where you may pick up many varieties of semi- 
precious stones, and on the plateau is the Park 
herd of buffalo. Formerly, they wandered at will 
through the Park, but the danger from poachers 
induced their segregation here, where they can be 
guarded more effectually in the winter, the time 
of danger. 

At first, I thought of sending Dudgeon while we 
stayed at the camp and played bridge. It is an 
easy day's drive to go and come. But the team 
was tired and so, in sooth, were we. We gave it up 
and turned our faces toward Mammoth Springs. 
I would like to have taken Billy Bear with me, and 
Chuck suggested that, if I would hang a dough- 
nut behind the surrey, he would follow it clear 
home. I suppose he would. These cold winter 
days I am wondering where Billy is and what he 
is doing. The snow is twenty feet deep up there, 
and I suppose he is curled up in some hollow, 
where the brush covers him thickly and the snow 
keeps out the cold, taking his winter nap and 
dreaming of doughnuts. 



MAMMOTH SPRINGS 



199 



^l^apUv tl* 




MAMMOTH SPRINGS 

ROM^Camp Roosevelt to Mammoth 
Springs is twenty-two miles, not 
particularly interesting especially 
after one has seen so much. 
There are, of course, falls. If 
you are interested in waterfalls, 
you should come here. You will find here falls 
of every variety, from the giant Yellowstone to 
baby falls that do not tumble far enough to break. 
There are ancient falls that are about worn out, 
ready to give up, tired of just falling for all these 
centuries. And there are young, ambitious falls, 
just starting in life, full of energy and fuss. 

There are slim falls and fat falls; quiet falls that 
do a great deal of business in the way of falling, 
in the course of a 3^ear, and make very little noise 
over it; and loud-voiced, fussy falls that are 



200 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

always calling your attention to the way in which 
they do it, and how much water they are carrying 
and what a business they are doing. 

But we were by this time blase. After seeing 
the Yellowstone, we did not care to spend any time 
over the kind of falls they have back East. So 
we lingered not till we topped the ridge from 
w^hich you first catch sight of the great peaks 
about Mammoth — Mt. Evarts, Electric and Bun- 
sen's Peaks. This is a superb mountain view, for 
you take in the valley of the Gardiner River, and 
the Yellowstone, where, far below and hidden 
from sight, is its third and, they say, its finest 
caiion. 

At noon we were at Mammoth, whose great 
wooden hotel marks the northern boundary of our 
tour. 

This is the official center of the Park, from 
which its administration is carried on. There is 
a two-troop post here, barracks and a military 
prison, a parade ground and a little square of blue- 
grass, from the center of which floats the flag; and 
you realize that you are once more in the United 
States. 



MAMMOTH SPRINGS 201 

Here we found the ladies and our friends, the 
G.'s, and were immediately started on a round of 
sight-seeing. Started, did I say? Nay — dragged. 
How I envied Mr. G. his firmness. Those sights, 
which he could see from his surrey and the hotel 
veranda, were well enough. 

But when it came to climbing up formations, 
getting his feet scalded, losing his wind, to see 
a few more geysers, not he. He had been an 
athlete in his youth and had taken so much exer- 
cise then that he had never required any since. 
So he viewed the hot springs from a distance, while 
we ^^saw things." 

There are plenty of things to see, for the "for- 
mation" is wholly different from that elsewhere. 
Old Faithful deposits a silicate, while these springs 
are calcareous. The formation of Old Faithful 
grows very slowly, imperceptibly. Even now, 
after thousands, possibly millions, of years, its 
mound is but a few feet above the valley. Here 
the springs have combined in the ages to raise a 
great hill three hundred feet in height, and they are 
still building. You can see the process every- 



202 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

where. These are boihng springs that overflow 
constantly, and, as the water runs, here it builds 
a dam and there an obstruction that forces it here 
and there. The water of the springs is wonder- 
fully transparent, bluer than sea water, with that 
peculiar, lifelike, pulsating motion that distin- 
guishes the thermal springs. 

You can look far down through the boiling 
water and see the tiniest ornament with which the 
spring has bedecked itself. Cleopatra's Spring is 
particularly noted for the beauty of its waters, 
though Pulpit Terrace is the most remarkable for 
its regularity, hanging to the side of a hill in a real 
and not a fancied resemblance to a great stone 
pulpit. 

In front of the hotel is a stone, forty feet 
high — Liberty Cap (for that is nearly its shape) — 
that is the cone of an extinct spring. 

The ground has washed away from it and left 
the spring standing. 

Cupid's Grotto is a fine example of this cal- 
careous working, and the Devil's Kitchen is inter- 
esting, as it is the crater of an excellent spring 



MAMMOTH SPRINGS 203 

which you may descend if you wish. I did not 
care to. 

It is moist and very ill-smelUng. The emana- 
tions from below are noxious, and the bones of 
animals that evidently died from suffocation are 
found there. One spring the bones of an elk, that 
had fallen in and perished during the winter, were 
found in it. 

All about Mammoth are beautiful walks and 
drives in the hills and mountains, for you are 
surrounded by lofty peaks. 

One of them, Mt. Evarts, commemorates one of 
the most remarkable examples of human endur- 
ance ever recorded. 

T. C. Evarts was a member of the Washburne 
expedition. He became separated from his party 
and his mule ran avvay with all his food and 
weapons. He lost his glasses and, being near- 
sighted, unused to the woods and without even 
a pocketknife, his plight may be imagined. 

His companions searched in vain for him, but, 
short of food themselves, they were compelled to 
give him up and push on. As soon as they 



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MAMMOTH SPRINGS 205 

reached a settlement they sent back two experi- 
enced men, who found him on the Upper Gardiner 
River near the mountain that bears his name. 
He had wandered for thirty-seven days, subsisting 
on thistle roots, which he boiled in the springs. 
He was without fire and kept from freezing at 
night by sleeping near the hot springs. 

Twice he went five days without food and three 
days without water. When found he was par- 
tially deranged, but recovered. 

There is a road, some twelve miles in length, that 
winds around Bunsen's Peak and by the Middle 
Gardiner Caiion. This is one of the five canons of 
the Park and it holds Osprey Falls, the second 
largest in the Park. 

The hotel is excellent and is kept open the yeai 
around. 

The acting superintendent of the Park (an 
army officer) lives here, and there is quite a little 
village clustered about the hotel and post. It is by 
far the busiest place in the Park, and is interesting 
the year around. In the winter, the antelope 
gather here in great numbers and are fed on alfalfa 

14 



206 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

when the snow is deep. Late in the fall the elk 
begin to come down from the high hills for their 
winter quarters in the valley, and I am told that 
the lower hills are covered with them. There 
were antelope about the hotel, when we were 
there, that followed us around begging sugar. 

All about the hotel are craters of extinct springs, 
where the water once boiled and bubbled, closed, 
I suppose, by the calcareous deposit. These 
springs are constantly committing suicide in that 
way. But the water and the fires are there some- 
where below. They must find an outlet, and 
new ones are formed. There are no geysers 
here. They are just, technically, "thermal 
springs." I prefer the ordinary designation of 
''hot springs." I know what that means without 
going to the dictionary. 

To those who prefer the remote, the lonely, 
places, the real communion with nature, I rec- 
ommend the farther parts of the Park. 

If you wish civilization and hot springs mixed, 
you will prefer Mammoth. You can dress for 
dinner there without being stared at. 



MAMMOTH SPRINGS 207 

You get green salads fresh from the railroads. 
Stock quotations are posted in the lobby. You 
are reminded of New York, and such like places. 
You almost forget that you are in Yellowstone 
Park, when night comes. 



THE TRAIL 



209 



(BhapUv 12* 




THE TILAIL 

EARS and years ago there was a 
trail that ran across from Gardi- 
ner to Cody. It remains but a 
reminiscence, a vague simula- 
crum of a road. You may fol- 
low it, if your eyes are good 
and you are forest-trained, from Mammoth to 
Gardiner. The magnificent stage road that fol- 
lows the Gardiner River is forbidden to horsemen. 
The soldiers from the post used to ride it, filled 
with Montana whisky, and, because of the Worm 
that Dieth Not, made trouble for regular trav- 
elers; so now everyone is forbidden to ride a horse 
over that road. 

But my old tray and I did not mind. We 
found the trail, and, soon becoming fast friends, 



210 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

ambled quietly over to the town of Gardiner, 
which lies at the northern gate of the Park. A& 
you leave Mammoth, the trail mounts a lofty 
ridge, and, at once, you are in a barren land. 

It is curious, but on every side of the Park 
is a region of little rain, an arid, barren land. 
The moment you quit its borders greenness and 
vegetation are left behind. 

It is as though Nature herself had set this nook 
there in the hills, surrounded by barriers, re-en- 
forced with arid and desolate hills. Beyond its 
limits are no wild flowers, no long green slopes, no 
streams and waterfalls, no animal life — just deso- 
lation. 

I like the trail. I have ridden it in many lands, 
followed its windings, perused its pages, learned 
its secrets, and, after the weary and crow^ded 
ways of the road, gladly found myself again in 
the loneliness of the trail. 

The road proceeds by indirection; it avoids 
obstacles; the trail surmounts them. On the road 
is traffic and commerce — people coming and 
going — the clamor of business. The trail is lonely. 



THE TRAIL 21 1 

remote; it lies in silent places, and pursues the 
unknown. You may learn a road, but no one 
ever really learns a trail. Always it is new, 
unknown, unguessed. 

If you go by the King's Highway there are 
many methods. The old family horse, the pair, 
your ^'coach and four," and all varieties of the 
^'devil-wagon." You may even go by stage. On 
the trail there is but one way — the outside of a 
horse, which, after all, is the best thing for the 
inside of a man. Long ago I discovered that. I 
shall never need springs and baths when I am ''off 
my feed." Ten days on the trail always puts me 
where I was twenty years ago. When my waist 
approaches too nearly the measure of my chest, 
when my last year's clothes set too snugly; when 
my brain is stale, and the cobwebs gather, and 
the think- works clog; when I am tired, and the 
world is tired of me — no doctors — no health resorts 
— just the trail. Believe me, if you try it once 
you will never use medicine again. 

You carry your hotel behind your saddle. Your 
kitchen outfit is a lard-pail, its cover the frying- 



212 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

pan, and the pail for the coffee. You are at home 
wherever there is wood, water and grass. There 
are no ^^rates/' special or otherwise; no tips, no 
cringing creature licking your boots for an extra 
quarter. You have the bridal chamber without 
charge. There are no masses or classes on the 
trail. You are your own man, just as good or bad 
as you really are, without varnish or gilding. 

My old friend Dan, who has ridden the trail 
for thirty years, knows every path and pass in 
the Rockies and Sierras and has become a phil- 
osopher by virtue of the long loneliness of the 
trail, where one has nothing to do but think about 
things, says there are many tests of a man, but 
the best is the trail. 

If he can sit his saddle without galling his horse, 
or worrying his mouth; if he can do his ten hours a 
day without a murmur and at nightfall see to his 
horse before himself; if he can make his own bed, 
pack his own blankets and cook his own grub; 
if he can rise in the cold, early dawn of those high 
altitudes, wash in ice-cold water, comb his hair 
with a pine cone and still be cheerful and smiling; 



THE TRAIL 213 

if he can do his share of the camp work without 
being asked: then, Dan says, he is a man. It 
matters not what his faults, he is a man. For, 
mark you, it is not all beer and skittles on the 
trail, though it has its fascination. In the cool 
mornings, when your horse is fresh and you mount 
the great ridges and look off, far, far across the great 
God-made hills and peaks; when you dip down 
and down and find at the bottom the little stream 
with its snow-fed, crystal current chattering over 
the granite pebbles, and you stoop from your 
saddle and fill your cup with the ambrosia; when 
Bucephalus drinks and drinks, and draws long 
breaths, and looks back at you with an expression 
that says, as plain as words, ^^This beats all your 
highballs;" in the long reaches of the great sugar- 
pines where the very topmost boughs whisper 
lowly, but all about you is still as the '^hush that 
follows prayer;" in the little valleys where your 
horse wades belly deep in the wild timothy, and 
his every step expresses the fragrance from 
unnamed and countless wild flowers; where the 
shy woodfold peep out at you unafraid, and know 



214 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

you are not there to kill them — ah! then you feel 
again as you did when the world was young. And 
then the delicious fatigue, so different from the 
weariness of everyday life, when at last you strike 
camp, unsaddle, water your horse, see that his 
picket-rope is just right and that the grass is good! 
The savory smell of the elusive trout cooking in the 
pan, the stricken deer hanging to a tree, promising 
a breakfast of deer's liver, the most delicate of 
camp dishes, the anxious search for a smooth spot 
to spread the blankets, where the forest mattress 
shall be just right, the pine needles not too thin 
nor the cones too thick for a forest bed. 

And eat! No one has ever known good eating 
till he has sat at the fire and eaten from an iron 
plate, his hunting knife for a fork, while Dan cooks 
and cooks till one can hold no more. 

Just below, the* little stream goes wandering 
and whispering to itself, and yon know that some- 
where down there Undine has returned, and if you 
were not so tired you could find her. The dark- 
ness falls, the sparks from the campfire go sailing 
up into a sky that is all velvety black and 



THE TRAIL 215 

arabesqued with golden stars, and the big tam- 
aracks lean nearer in the friendliest way. 

And then the long, long smokes and the long, 
long talks about the fire, and, better still, the long 
silences. For on the trail you learn each other. 
You do not talk unless you have something to say. 
And best of all are those long silences. 

The lost friend sits at your elbow. The lost love 
whispers in your ear as of old. The dreams of 
youth return, and all that you would, but failed 
of, seems near and possible. And so, at last, to 
dreamless sleep — sleep that the forest life, coming 
and going about you on its nocturnal business, 
is powerless to disturb. 

But there is another side to it. It is not all 
jam and pickles. There are days when wood and 
water are far apart. Days when you crawl up 
long slopes and climb down by precipitous paths, 
where you must dismount and lead your horse 
down granite slides where a misstep would mean 
the end of things. Days when grub is scarce and 
water more so. When you ride for hours through 
barren desert wastes, till your tongue swells and 



216 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

you faint with weariness and thirst; nights when 
you make a/^dry camp," and suffer with your 
horse. No, it is not all elysian; but, when the 
trail is just right, and your horse is your friend, 
and you come to know his mouth, and he talks to 
you with every twitch of his head, and tells you 
when to pull and when to let the reins lie on 
his back — then, believe me, there is nothing like 
the trail. 

So my old grey and I cantered up and down, 
over the long, barren hills, and down where the 
little aspen thickets gather about a hidden water- 
course till we came to Gardiner. I tied my horse 
in front of the ^^Bucket of Blood," the most palatial 
of Gardiner's business houses, and had a commer- 
cial transaction with its urbane proprietor which 
left me feeling as though I had swallowed a live 
wire. I saw the granite ^^Gateway," that is not a 
gateway at all, because no one ever passed through 
it. It is a hideous structure of boulders that was 
built solely as an excuse for someone to make a 
speech. It is getting so in this fair land of ours 
that anything is an excuse for a speech. When- 



THE TRAIL 217 

ever two or three men get together and cut a 
watermelon, they want someone to make a speech 
over it. 

As T started back I overtook the drunkard. 
There are other drunkards, of course, but this 
was the only one I had met on the trip. He was 
one of those who can only think aloud. His mental 
processes repeated themselves in speech as literally 
as a phonograph its records. I was a godsend to 
him, and he immediately began, after the usual 
platitudes of the trail, to think in his vernacular. 
He was one of those ^^Say" conversationalists. 
^'Say, I got the best wife you ever saw. I got a 
ranch over there and she jest runs that ranch. 
Say, I got two kids. Say, I wish you could see them 
kids. One of 'em has black hair and one of 'em 
has yellow hair. Say, ain't that funny?" And so 
on, till his trail finally split with mine and I lost 
him. 

Coming over the hill I met the grey lady with 
her little music roll of baggage, trudging her way 
over to Gardiner. I stopped and talked with her 
for a moment and wondered at her. She had 



2ia BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

.tramped the hundred and sixty miles of the Park 
roads, had seen more than you and I would see in a 
hundred and sixty days, and was now on her way 
back to sorting seeds and writing addresses, 
entirely satisfied with her summer's outing. 

I had just parted from her when I witnessed a 
tragedy, all unwittingly. I was coming up a little 
slope; a sergeant and two troopers were riding 
over the next. The troopers turned down the 
hill and rushed to a group of willows bordering 
the river. Two young men, mere boys, clad in 
civilians' clothes, emerged and, after a moment's 
parley, came up to the road with the soldiers. I 
rode on and spoke to the sergeant, something 
about the grey lady. He replied briefly, 
preoccupied with the two men Avhom I took to be 
laborers. 

I galloped away and, looking back, saw the two 
men walking, a soldier on each side, the sergeant 
in the rear. 

I thought I had a seeing eye, but I did not grasp, 
at all, that tragedy of those two broken lives. One 
had stolen from a comrade, the other from the 



THE TRAIL 219 

post. Both had deserted, and tried for freedom 
by way of the railroad. The post was aroused, 
cordons thrown out, the hills searched, and this 
patrol had caught them. The very men that they 
had bunked and fought with (for this was one of 
the troops of a fighting regiment) had to take 
them back to a trial that meant Alcatraz and dis- 
grace; and I passed it, all unconscious of its sig- 
nificance. 

But such is the way of the trail. On the big 
road you are privileged to be curious; not so on the 
trail. Do not ask whence nor whither. Your 
name is your own. You do not write it down in 
books when you stop for the night. You do not 
exchange cards. Give everyone a ^'good-day'' 
when you meet; let the loquacious talk, and the 
silent keep their secrets. It is no business of 
yours who comes or goes, nor where nor why. 
That is the law of the trail. 



NORRIS BASIN 221 

C^^^ pJORR^IS BASIN f j 

ft ft^^^ ^^BROM Mammoth Springs to Norris 
S^^^ r^S Greyser Basin is twenty miles, 
j|)f%^ ^^^^ ^iid by that route we started on 
^B^^fi^SSS our homeward journey. It is not 
^^f'afjfi^^ ^y purpose, however, to Hnger 
^^^'^^^'^■-i'^^ or to tire you with a minute 
description of that journey. 

It is full of wonders and beauties; but there is 
too much scenery in this book now. You pass 
the Hoodoos, a little plain covered with boulders 
of a travertine formation, curiously misshapen 
and fantastically carved by erosion, lying as 
though some god, in sport, had tipped them over. 
Beyond this is the famous Golden Gate, the canon 
of Glen Creek, which contains the Rustic Falls 
and one of the engineering marvels of the Park, 
where the road is carried along the canon's side on 
a cement viaduct. 

15 



222 



BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 



We dip down to the Swan Valley, through 
whose wide expanse of greenness wanders a little 




EAGLE NEST ROCK— GARDINER CANON 

tranquil stream, a tributary of the Gardiner 
River; and here I had another example of Park 



NORRIS BASIN 223 

influence. A hundred yards from the road a flock 
of thirty or forty Canada geese were sailing in the 
water. I walked up to them and got one snap- 
shot at a hundred feet, and a second just as they 
were leaving the water. 

Halfway to the Basin is the Apollinaris Spring, 
that bubbles from the wide hillside — a, natural, 
sparkling water not much unlike its namesake. 

Two miles farther is the obsidian cliff, a vast 
mass of volcanic glass, mentioned heretofore as the 
one through which Jim Bridger tried to shoot the 
elk. It is black, rather like anthracite in appear- 
ance. The river runs at its foot, and to make a 
roadway was a problem. It was too hard to be 
drilled for blasting, and Colonel Norris, the 
engineer, broke it into fragments by first heating 
it with fires along its surface and then throwing 
cold water on it. 

We passed Beaver Lake, with its numerous 
dams and houses still standing, and the forest 
denudation that evidences their busy effort, but 
the beavers had long ago departed. 



224 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

I do not know why it has not been restocked. 
Certainly we are entitled to see some beavers at 
work. It is, I suppose, due to the fact that the 
beavers are the shyest of all fur-bearing animals, 
and would absolutely refuse to exhibit for the 
benefit of tourists. 

Just beyond is Roaring Mountain, with an 
enormous steam vent at the top that can be heard 
for a mile. The heat has killed the trees for many 
acres about it, and here again is an example of the 
curious intermittence of these phenomena. Prior 
to 1902, the noise and heat were slight. In that 
year it burst forth and has continued. 

As we approach the Norris Basin Hotel these 
examples of volcanic action increase. Every- 
where are boiling springs, mud volcanoes, tremors 
and threatenings. This region, to my mind, is the 
very center of the volcanic disturbances of the 
Park. The geysers are not large, but the whole 
region gives you the feeling that 3^ou are standing 
on a crust that may at any time give way. New 
springs and volcanoes appear frequently, and old 
ones cease. Acres and acres of forest are dead 



NORRIS BASIN 225 

and withered. Other acres are but losing their 
foliage from the heat and expulsive material 
lately cast over them. 

A mere catalogue of the boilers and hissers and 
exploders would fill this book. The whole region 
lies in a basin surrounded by gentle hills, crowned 
with greenness; but the greater portion of the 
valley is sere, baked and boiled, given over to the 
activities of the internal fires. 

The hotel, a wooden structure, stands on a 
gentle eminence, apart from the disturbances, so 
that you have no apprehension that it will be 
blown up, and is, in itself, one of the phenomena 
of the Park. 

As I have said, all the hotels are good, surpris- 
ingly good, when you consider that everything 
must be hauled long distances from the railroad 
and that not even an onion grows in the Park. 
But this one was the least promising of all ex- 
ternally—a rambling, one-story frame structure, 
used mostly as a lunch station and conducted by 
a lady. We were expected, and a special dinner 
was awaiting us. 



226 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

The Park air does make one think of eating long 
before the dinner hour, and we were fully ready, 
but not prepared for such a meal. The table was 
set with beautiful silver, exquisite naperj^, and 
shaded candles. The duchess who waited on us 
was the best of her kind — swift, handy, and good 
to look at. 

And the dinner! It began with a bisque of 
tomato, smooth as its porcelain namesake; then a 
great planked whitefish; a saute of chicken livers; 
a broiled squab with a punch of Maraschino that 
Sherry could not surpass; a green salad; a Nes- 
selrode pudding; black coffee and real Camem- 
bert cheese — none of your imitations — and a 
touch, you know, just a touch, of that nectar that 
is brewed by some wondrous beings from the es- 
sence of the humble but much-loved mint — green, 
translucent — that finishing touch that, with its 
soothing force, harmonizes all that has gone 
before. 

I fear I grow old. I lose my sense of proportion. 
In retrospect, that dinner looms as grandly as Old 
Faithful. It was the most beautiful thing in the 



NORRIS BASIN 227 

Park, save the Falls of the Yellowstone. It was 
so unexpected; so timely, prepared with such 
exquisite skill and forethought for those unknown 
wayfarers, that it will always remain a blessed 
reminiscence. 

You may be sure sleep was long and deep that 
night, but we had forty miles to go the next day 
to make Yellowstone and the Gateway in time for 
the night train; so we did not linger to look 
at the goysers, which make up in numbers for 
their lack of size. The Constant and the Minute 
Men go off regularly once a minute. There is the 
Locomotive, a boiling spring from which the steam 
escapes exactly as from an over-pressed boiler. 
There are evil-looking mud springs and ill-smelling 
water springs. For a long distance you walk 
across a temporary roadway surrounded by 
rumblings and roarings and hissings, with the 
ground so warm to the feet that you do not 
care to step off the board walk. In fact, you do 
not get clear of hot ground for more than a mile 
from the hotel. It is a marvelous region; taken 
for all in all the most terrific in the Park. You 



228 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

want to see it once. I think you will hardly care 
to do so again. 

Four miles from the hotel we struck the beauti- 
ful canon of the Gibbon and followed the river for 
some miles; in fact, until it unites with the Firehole 
to make the Madison. 

The road down the Gibbon is the prettiest in 
the Park. It dips and slides around the caiion 
walls, with the river beside us, flowing smoothly 
over long rock slides, or fretting at some impedi- 
ment. Here leaping down the Virginia Cascade, 
and there spreading out into smooth, long reaches 
that reflect the trees and mountains. 

At noon we stopped for lunch at the junction of 
the Gibbon and the Firehole, and there struck the 
road we came in on. Coming in, we had turned to 
the right to follow the Firehole to its upper basin, 
where Old Faithful performs its hourly miracle. 
Returning, we had followed down the other 
branch of the Madison to their junction. 

We spread our blankets on the grass and opened 
the lunch that our lady of the Norris Hotel had 
provided — a forest wonder. There was every- 



NORRIS BASIN 229 

thing in it that should be in a lunch basket, the 
best of their kind, and one item — of green glass 
with a long neck and foreign words on its side — 
not often found in regular hotel lunch baskets. 

Once more we pursued the beaten highway that 
we knew to our starting point, and at 5:30 o'clock 
drew up in front of the station at Yellowstone, and 
saw again the iron rails and the Pullmans — the 
insignia of civilization. 

We returned to commonplace clothes and saw 
the great stages whirl up to the platform and dis- 
charge their crowds of tired, but happy, tourists. 

We spent an hour in the curio shops, where the 
Lady kindly invited me to buy for her a Polar 
bearskin rug, marked down to two hundred and 
fifty. I love such things, but I am frequently 
able to restrain my mad desire for them. I did 
this time. 

And so, at last, the whistle blew, and the pines 
began to shp behind us. We were back, back 
again, in the world of work, and the world of 
play; such a dear and lovely world was left behind. 



230 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

Alas! how hard it was to leave it! We 
promised we would see it again — we said ^^au 
revoir but not goodbye," but in our hearts we 
knew we never should, though always it will be 
there waiting for us. The happy animals, the 
geysers, the streams and falls, the stately hills, 
and all its beauties and wonders will be for other 
eyes. Ours have beheld them. 

We have seen the wonder of the world and are 
content. 



SOME SUGGESTIONS 



231 



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SOME SUGGESTIONS 

EARLY BELOVED, if you have 
followed this wandering narra- 
tive so far, some of you will 
sometime go to the Yellowstone. 
For your benefit and because you 
have gone so far with me, and 
because I like you, I will, without price, give you 
a few suggestions for the trip. 

As I have said before, there are so many ways 
of viewing the Park. If you go in a party, the best 
way is to engage your own team and driver. Then 
you may go rapidly or slowly, stop where and 
when you like,take as many side trips as please you, 
and there are many. You may, on the other hand, 
go by the regular stages and make the regular tour 
in five days. Or, you may go by the regular stages 



232 BOOK OF A HUNDRED BEARS 

and break your trip wherever you like, taking seat 
in a later stage. 

Nearly always there are vacant seats, so you 
need not, unless you wish, and are hurried, go all 
the way with the same stage. By notifying the 
local manager of the stage line at your hotel, you 
can provide yourself with passage at a later date 
and thus avoid the rush of the continuous tour. 

Do not take much luggage. A suitcase is all 
you need. People do not dress for dinner in the 
Park. No one dresses up much, but be sure to 
take heavy clothing. Consider that the altitude 
ranges nearly all the way from six thousand to 
seven thousand feet. Last winter's suit will not 
be amiss. Get rid of the superfluities. Forget 
clothes. Leave the bothers and worries of civil- 
ization as far as possible. 

You need not cut yourself off from the world 
unless you desire to. 

There is a telegraph line throughout the Park, 
and, by arranging in advance, you may always be 
in touch with the outside world. 



^„n 151 



RD 



SOME SUGGESTIONS 233 

If you wish to take the camping trip, arrange 
in advance for it. Mr. Haynes will furnish you 
with guide, tents, pack-horses, saddle-horses, or 
regular conveyances. You can then go where you 
like and see the wilder and more remote parts of 
this great forest. If you care for the outdoor life, 
this is the true way to go. For myself, I have 
promised another trip, but doubtless shall not take 
it. I have made myself many such promises, 
when I have visited some charming spot and hur- 
ried away before I was satisfied, and then never 
returned. 

So it will be with you, and do not be in too much 
of a hurry. Take it from me, you will not regret 
the time you spend up there. 

To sum it up, I repeat: It is the most wonderful 
region in the world. It holds more marvels, more 
beauties, more surprises, than any other in the 
world. At the last I feel how inadequately I have 
described it; how inadequately, you will know 
when you go there. 

(The End.) 



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